[trailbits]

I can imagine this helping anyone that has struggled with computer-related overuse injuries. I had a bad case of tendinitis that made using a mouse or trackpad very painful. I would have loved to have this kind of device as another option.

[moffkalast]

I'm really wondering why nobody's selling a foot operated mouse yet, it would be pretty practical even for normal people when typing with both hands.

[hinkley]

Best I personally managed was push-to-talk via a foot pedal, to help with mic discipline in cooperative games without reducing my reaction time.

I'm not sure my feet have the accuracy to work as a mouse.

I think assistive devices do better as a class when some fraction of them are also usable or even attractive to able people as well. It gets us thinking about other modes of interaction and of course it brings the unit price for those items down out of the stratosphere.

Foot mouse will unfortunately stay niche, but when I saw the device in this article, I thought, "Why not for everybody?"

[trailbits]

I did experiment with using a trackball taped to the floor. It's hard to get precise positioning moving your foot. I think using the tongue along the roof of your mouth would be more precise and less fatiguing. What was more useful was a set of 9 foot switches that could be programmed to send arbitrary keystrokes. I could off load from my hands the most common keypresses I do all day, for example: pageup, pagedown, tab, enter, backspace, mouse click, passwords... along with speech recognition software you can get at least non-coding tasks done without using your hands too much.

[RogerL]

Lift your foot up and try to balance in your seat and see how it feels. Try using a standing desk with it. Put a pen between your toes and try to draw a square and feel major muscles in your upper thighs struggling to make these fine control motions. Put on high heels and try to do anything that isn't gross movement. Sit in a train/plane/car and think of trying to use a laptop with a foot controller. Heck, put your mouse on the ground right now, turn pointer speed down as slow as possible to accommodate the gross movements of your legs, and try to use it.

[pragma_x]

FWIW, I've considered mapping a midi pedal board to meta keys and macros before. That alone could be useful - you'd go from a typist to something like an organist.