RSIMon

Why?

I wrote RSIMon recently when my mouse hand started giving me grief. My biggest problem is forgetting to take reasonable breaks after some activity. I downloaded a number of the readily available usage monitor/reminder type apps, but none worked with the way I did. Most of them just reminded you every so many minutes to take a break. Unfortunately the way I work I can be to and fro from my PC several times in that time, not actually having been using it consistently. The cleverer apps would monitor the time I had been using the PC but again were time based.

Description

The novel feature of RSIMon is that it is pain based. There are a number of tunable parameters to say how much various actions cause. For example, I find that dragging is worse than moving the mouse. Keyboard work causes me very little pain at all. From these facts I can set up the RSIMon to weight dragging the mouse more heavily than movement etc. Once a certain 'pain' threshold has been reached, the dialog pops to the top to remind me to take a break. The 'pain' level decays and when it reaches zero the dialog goes back to the tray (unless it was already visible).

In addition it has two settings, for painful days and normal days. All these settings are stored in the user registry area, so they should migrate with you (if you have a roaming profile) and should be separated by user (if you have multiple users set up).

RSIMon is still a work in progress, but it's functional enough for now!

Installation

The binary zipfile contains the dialog based program and the DLL required to run it. Place these both in the same directory and run the .exe.

Removal

I haven't got around to a proper removal process, but basically just delete the two files that were unzipped. If you want to remove the registry entries, they live under Software/MJT in the HKCU. Mess at your own peril! If the preceding made no sense to you, just leave the registry alone - it will be fine.

Download

RSIMon is released under the terms of the GNU public license, which is available from the GNU homepage. You can have either the Win32 binaries (<40K) or the source files (<150K). It was written under Visual C++ version 5 for Win32. The core 'pain' algorithm should be portable, but most of the app is dealing with counting keypresses, reading mouse movements and updating the dialog, none of which is very portable at all :-(

I would be grateful if anyone who finds this of any use could let me know!

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