Having worked in front of computer screens for years, I am witness to many people who suffer from various injuries resulting from prolonged periods sitting in the same position, staring at the screen for hours or typing too much. These injuries are usually called RSI (repetitive strain injury) and are a result of overusing your arms or wrists to carry out a certain task over and over again. This often results in painful situations like torn ligaments and stiff muscles.
Big Stretch Reminder is a free tool that keeps reminding a Windows PC users to take a break at regular intervals to avoid RSI related health issues. Once installed, it goes to work right away and starts displaying reminders hourly to take a break of 10 minutes. In these 10 minutes, you can get a cup of coffee and some glazed donuts to wake yourself up. You can choose to spend these 10 minutes walking around and stretch your legs. And as my coworker does, you can rush to the gym and do a bunch of jumping jacks. What you do in these 10 minutes is entirely up to you, but you have to get up and move around.
Big Stretch Reminder can be customized to change when and how often the reminders are displayed. For example, you can set the time between two breaks to anything you want. You can also choose the type of reminder that is going to be displayed – micro-break, popup window or balloon notification. The micro-break notification stays on the screen for 1 minute. The popup window stays on the top of your screen until you close it. The balloon notification just shows up in the notification area.
You can choose the messages that the reminder displays on your screen as well. You can leave it to the default which displays random RSI tips. You can choose to display motivational quotes. You can also display a custom message written by you.
Other settings include playing of a sound when the reminder is displayed. You can pick one of the usual beep sounds or you can choose your custom audio files. We can have an audio file recorded in a friend’s voice asking to take a break and use that audio file. There are as many options as your imagination.
Big Stretch Reminder is a very useful application for all the people who spend 8-10 hours working in front of their computers. If you follow the advice earnestly, you can definitely avoid any of these RSI problems later on.
You can download Big Stretch Reminder from https://monkeymatt.com/bigstretch/.