Published: July 16, 2019, 8:00 p.m. MDT
Amy Choate-Nielsen’s father created a keyboard layout that is beneficial to people with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and taught her something about tenacity. Amy Choate-Nielsen.
Once upon a time, at the end of a class, one of my journalism professors called me tenacious.
I didn’t like the course much, and I hardly spoke a word in it, so I was surprised at her assessment of me. I had to look the word up to double-check its meaning, and still, I was baffled. Nevertheless, I took it as a compliment, as I wondered if it was true.
I was raised to question conventional wisdom. My father, in particular, encouraged me to look at my world and ask if it was true. It didn’t matter if 50 or 500 other people believed it, they could all be wrong, so go ahead and ask. Find out for yourself, he would say. Before my dad was even a teenager, he did his own research and determined that yes, the world is round and no, dinosaurs aren’t real. He truly embodies the spirit of George Bernard Shaw, who famously wrote, “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”
One of my father’s dreams has been to create a keyboard with more efficient letter placement than Qwerty, the letter arrangement that is currently on almost all phones, iPads, laptops and computers in the world. He first caught the spark of an idea watching his father repair Remington Rand typewriter machines for a living. The keys often jammed, my father said, and his theory was that if you could put the letters of the alphabet that are used most in the easiest position for the fingers to access, one could type faster and never worry about jamming the keys on a computer.
In 1978 he started working on his idea. The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard caught his attention, but he realized the difficulty of switching between the two typing methods. The Dvorak keyboard changed the position of 30 of 32 of the keys on the keyboard, and it was not widely accepted. My dad started studying the most commonly used letters in the English language and romance languages. He found that E and T comprised one-quarter of all letter usage in English, and E was
the most frequent letter used in the romance languages. He combined his studies with Morse code and eventually narrowed the number of letters to rearrange down to 11: six on the home row and five on the other rows.
In 1995, as computers were becoming more and more prolific and more people experienced difficulties typing with a medical condition known as carpal tunnel syndrome, my dad submitted his research to be studied at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He wanted to know if typing on his proposed keyboard system would impact the symptoms people felt through carpal tunnel syndrome. The Pittsburgh study determined that typing on my dad’s configuration of the alphabet reduced the distance fingers travelled while typing by more than one-third, and the extension of fingers was also reduced by one-third.
My dad named his new keyboard “Finger Relief” and he approached the Food and Drug Administration in 1996 to approve the system as an alternative typing method that could help people with carpal tunnel syndrome shift the work of typing from the wrist to the hand. His theory, which was supported by the study at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, was that people with carpal tunnel syndrome could type more comfortably with his keyboard, and that it would improve their symptoms.
For years, my father tried to market Finger Relief to anyone who would listen. He travelled to trade shows across the country. He contacted computer companies. He called schools and doctors. He obtained patents. He had me decorate and paint the 11 changed keys in different colors to help his presentations. He ordered more keyboards. And he kept following up with the FDA, all to no avail.
There came a time when I began to believe that my dad should just let Finger Relief go. He had spent so much time and money on his dream that never caught on, I couldn’t bear to see him continue to be disappointed. But, my dad is tenacious. In 2016, he applied to the FDA, for the fourth time, to have his keyboard considered as a medical device. Then he waited, and never heard a response. It looked like the answer was no, again.
Then, two weeks ago, at the age of 72, my father finally got the news he has been waiting to hear for 23 years. The FDA said yes, the Finger Relief Interossei Lumbricals Neuromuscular Therapy Device is intended for medical purposes, and it can be used to delay or prolong the onset of symptoms in people who have carpal tunnel syndrome. I asked my dad what it was like to wait so long to finally hear those words.
“It’s like having your fishing pole in the water for decades, and you start to wonder if there are any fish down there,” he said.
That’s tenacious — to hold on to a dream for 23 years and insist that it become a reality, even when other people around you say you should just give up. He never quit. And, as he inspires me to look around my world and dream and say, “Why not?” I am so, so glad.