After the computer mouse was introduced on the market some years ago, humans began reporting pain and suffering in respect to the device use. Medical professionals and others soon discovered a direct link between those reporting these injuries and the computer mouse. With the escalation of reported injuries came the rise in ergonomics and awareness that the computer hardware manufacturers must include an additional focus during new product development to more adequately support the human users. The 80/20 principle has since been giving way to increased amount of development time and attention being focused on human factors.

The United States Federal Government's Department of Labor and OSHA, the agency in place to protect American workers on the job, has taken the human suffering seriously devoting much time and attention to research and discovered a growing population of sufferers which they in turn reported in depth reports which demonstrate the costs to business owners each year. This effort has been sufficient in overthrowing the tired design principle in favor of new influences such as those seen and advocated by ergonomic engineers.

Ergonomics is actually an applied science, which includes knowledge of human anatomy. Therefore, ergonomic engineering is devoted to the addition of human factors in the design and development process of common products used by humans. In respect to this article, ergonomic engineering is intent on redesign of the computer mouse. With the influences of old, growing popularity of ergonomics, and the introduction of new interface-free touch technologies comes a decisive partnership that may actually prevent further human suffering in the home and work place thanks to the US Department of Labor and OSHA for unwittingly denoting the computer mouse as an occupational hazard whether officially or not. Thus, this unintentional government scrutiny opened the door for ergonomic engineering by insisting attention be paid to the human users.

In respect to computer hardware devices, the addition of the human factor in the design process, will aid in the prevention of new strain related injuries, such as those experienced by sufferers of carpal tunnel syndrome.

The idea is that touch technologies can make provide ease of input and thereby influence product makers to design with the human element's comfort as a primary factor. Already successful, new touch technologies can and will dramatically aid in reducing the number of injuries in the work place. Those individuals expected to benefit most from touch technologies are the same population currently at risk for strain related injuries. To be specific, any computer user with a mouse, graphic designers, and data entry workers are said to be the most afflicted populations of sufferers.

Products that predominantly feature new touch technologies are touch screen monitors. Monitors of this type have been on the market for some time but it was not yet known of the ergonomic features until OSHA published the statistics of human suffering in association with the computer mouse. Touch screen monitors feature a new duality never noted before with the exception of this particular article in that the monitor acts as both the input and the output device. Another welcome benefit for consumers is that touch screen monitors require no additional software or application to use; they can work with most mouse-driven applications already in existence in every computer operating system. The learning curve is minimal simply reach out and touch to perform an input task.

Touch Technologies are both exciting and useful for humans seeking a better way to input, edit, manipulate, organize, and present information. What is next in computing? Following in the success footsteps of touch technologies comes new multi-touch technologies. Multi-touch technologies present an even greater diversity and allow human creativity to reach its full potential in computing and graphic design.