PC has became a part of our everyday life - we use it both for work and play. In many homes, PC has become the entertainment center of the family and these will soon replace the once familiar couch potato generation. We very well know the couch potato syndrome is due to an unbalanced and unhealthy life style with spending too much time on the TV and the couch, yet many just can't kick the habit. The new PC genertaion too has its own share of problems called RSI, CTL, OOS, which stand for Repetitive Stress Injuries, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Occupational Overused Syndrome. These syndromes are the result of doing the same repetitive tasks over a long period of time causing discomfort and factigue to certain parts of our body organs.

These problems usually start as slight discomfort and factigue from the beginning, often arching muscles and stiff joints are the early signs. It can take a long while to recover and debiliting if not treated early. Prevention is the only key to these problems. One should vary your tasks and take periodic breaks before fatigue occurs and do stretches and exercises to rejuvenate your muscles. This helps to reduce the possibility of discomfort or factigue and changing your sitting position occasionally during the work day helps too. All this is easier said than done especially when one is concentrating on the job. Young kids are always too engrossed with their games and wanting to prove to their peers before the next school day starts often not knowing and refusing to quit. Fortunately there are many software that can help these group of people. Many of these software are developed out of necessity due to the programmer himself wanting to force himself to take a break before it is too late. All the software features here are free for personal use.

Healthy Work

Healthy Work is an entertaining program specially for young children. A cute animated wizard pops up every 45 minutes knocking on your monitor screen to remind you to take a break and exercise. Time interval between exercise can be set by user and default is at 45 minutes. A recorded exercise video play back on a pop up window to demonstrate a set of exercises that can help prevent RSI. These excercises are based on Cesar and Mensendieck Therapy designed to reduce RSI/CTD injury.

Healthy Work is a freeware complete with 3 exercise sets and in actual fact it is a non expire trialware. User can upgrade to healthy work pro that includes a 20 exercise sets. Healthy Work is a wonderful software for young children who seemed glued to their personal computer. You can download it free from here or visit their website at http://www.winshare.com/hwindex.htm for more information.

Healthy Work is developed by a team of healthcare and ergonomic specialists to help increase circulation, relieve tension, and guard against RSI and CTS. These flexible and easy to use software can be easily setup by anyone and user can set their own setting to overide the default setup.

SoundBreak

The creater of Soundbreak Leon Matthews mentioned on the readme file and also on his website that he created this software out of nessesity because he often forgot to eat and made visits to the toilet!

Just as the name says Soundbreak plays a sound or a speech to remind you at predetermined interval to take a break. "A sound way to better health" as Leon Matthews claims what his software will do for you. Nevetheless this is a sound idea to remind one working on the PC who often gets too involved to take regular breaks. What this software does is, after every 10 minutes (default pre-set interval) the program will pay a sound from the randomly selected wave file to remind user to stretch or take a break. This software is not intrusive to the user which was mentioned as the reason the programmer created Soundbreak because he was not happy with other software that he had trialed. Soundbreak comes with many short wave files (.wav) from movies and TV. However you can add your own and delete unwanted ones as you please. If you like you can use this as a timer that sounds at predetermined intervals as defined by you. This a pretty simple user friendly software and user can control most of the operations. It also allows different user to log in with individual customised setting. During normal operation you only see a tiny coffee cup icon on your system tray and this software doesn't use much resources from your PC as it is only 834KB in size.

Soundbreak is a freeware. You can download it here or visit them at www.lost.co.nz.

Break Reminder

Break Reminder is free for personal and non-profit use; business and commercial users need to register with cheqsoft.com for user licence.
This award wining software enforces at a predetermined period default at 4 minutes which the program called a Micropause. During Micropause period a small window pops up on your monitor with a count down bar counting down to 20 second period (default setting). User should take a short pause to relax muscles, do short stretch of hands and fingers before continuing with his/her work. After every 12 Micropause a Rest Break is enforced. User can change the interval between Rest Break too. If there is a long period of keyboard and mouse inactivity the Rest Break will be reset regardless how many Micropause has passed. The same Micropause window pops up during Rest Break, this time it counts down to about 8 minutes interval and user should walk away from the PC and do something else - have a cup of coffee, take a rest or do some stretching exercises. Break Reminder comes with a very educational help file. You can find lots of information on OOS and RSI. There are also information on the type of exercises you should do to prevent RSI and OOS. When no keyboard and mouse movements are detected the software will stop counting down and even reverse the counting from the predetermined Micropause period. If the inactivity period is too long it may even reverse the count of the Rest Break. Break Reminder is a flexible software which allows user to change timer setting, break internal setting and sound setting on its control panel. User can also ignore the Micropause and Rest Break interval as well, nevertheless it reminds you how fast time flies when you are having fun.

We recommend Break Reminder and for more information you can click here to visit their web site where you can find further information on how to exercise and set up your workstation. Break Reminder is designed by Tom Hingston a software designer specialized in design elegance through simplicity of user interfaces. Product concept and medical advice come from his brother Dr David Hingston MB ChB MBA, a medical specialist and general practitioner experienced in managing OOS / RSI patients. To download Break Reminder click here.