Maltron

Maltron specialises in making keyboards for the prevention and etiological (root cause) treatment of repetitive strain injury.

Malt's original invention and the company's flagship design, the Fully Ergonomic 3D Keyboard, is the most highly adapted; it incorporates a curved surface in which the keys' angles and depths are staggered to compensate for the different lengths and placement of the fingers.

Malt made several suggestions for improvement, telling Hobday of her failure to engage the interest of any manufacturers in actually building her ideal keyboard.

[1] The full name of the company, PCD Maltron Ltd, stems from Hobday's original electronics firm, Printed Circuit Design Limited, based in Farnborough, Hampshire.

The seeds of PCD Maltron were sown when another Hampshire business had inquired about the possibility of custom manufacture of a computer keyboard.

"[4] Customers requested a halfway house between a conventional QWERTY keyboard and the curved Maltron, so a flat (2D) version was introduced which although lacking the curvature of the 3D keyboard, incorporates split key groups, and offset letter rows to accommodate the different lengths of the fingers.

[8] The Maltron layout was derived from frequency of use (FoU) statistics, plus additional considerations, such as the most frequent two- and three-letter combinations found in words.

Further variation in design has been a slight rotation of the key bowl upward in the centre which reduces the amount of pronation in operators' wrists.

Referring back specifically to the Model-B, the key bowl required the hands, although separated from each other, still to be rotated outward as though operating a flat keyboard.

Another change moved the twelve function keys to a new top row inside the bowl rather than as a straight line along the back, which the single-handed versions retain.

The blank area between the two thumb keys has also been raised to prevent the "dropped-wrist" operation of the number pad, although because of its location and layout, the keyboard must be moved laterally when entering continuous numeric data, to accommodate the dominant hand (left or right).