Foot pedals are powerful, underutilized tools that can drastically boost productivity, eliminate awkward keystrokes, and cut down on repetitive motions. Regardless of your professional application, incorporating a programmable USB foot pedal into your workstation can transform your daily computing workflow. By offloading complex tasks to your feet, you can streamline your operations and significantly reduce the physical strain associated with long hours at the computer.
The Professional Benefits of Feet-on Control
More so than perhaps any other profession, software engineers are asked to log long hours in front of a keyboard. They type incredibly complex lines of code quickly and with a high degree of precision. Furthermore, coding has an inherently high degree of repetition. All of these factors make foot pedals great productivity boosters for software engineers. Foot pedals can be programmed to execute complex macros, replace awkward key combinations, or switch between applications.
“Using a foot pedal with your keyboard feels impossibly geeky at first. Until you use it for a while, and then you start wondering why you didn’t recruit your feet for help years ago. It’s not like they had anything better to do all this time. Sewing machines have foot pedals. Cars have foot pedals. Airplanes have rudder pedals. Why not computers?”
— Avdi Grimm | Virtuous Code
Streamlining Dental and Clinical Workflows
Dentists and their assistants are very adept at using their feet to control various pieces of equipment while keeping their hands free and clean to work on patients’ teeth. Most of these pedals are connected to specific medical devices. However, a programmable USB foot pedal connected straight to the exam room computer allows a hygienist to enter data, toggle between applications, click the mouse, navigate x-rays, and take pictures seamlessly. This helps save time, boost production, reduce cross-contamination, and improve patient care.
For intraoral camera operations, using a foot pedal avoids the shaky, out-of-focus pictures that often occur when trying to press a capture button directly on the camera. Furthermore, Kinesis pedals are especially great for hands-free perio charting and other dental charting applications. German dental technology company Parostatus trusts Kinesis foot pedals with their software to allow their dentists to work faster—completing a hygienic assessment in under 60 seconds and a prophylaxis index in under 5 minutes.
These USB foot pedals work with all PC and Mac operating systems and are compatible with DEXIS, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and any other software platform that uses keyboard shortcuts. Custom programming is saved to the foot pedal’s internal memory, meaning pedals can be moved between exam rooms without having to be reprogrammed.
Enhancing Healthcare, Diagnostics, and Ultrasound Systems
Kinesis USB foot pedals can be used in a variety of healthcare applications for data entry or hands-free computer control. You can pair the foot pedal with any computer, tablet, or machine equipped with a full-size USB port. Pedals are ideal for pathology, radiology, ultrasound, dictation, workflow management, and much more.
Users can program the pedal to output any keyboard shortcut or text macro. These pedals are ETL recognized for near-patient use and can be custom waterproofed with an IPX-8 rating for intense clinical environments. For instance, Siemens Healthcare trusts Kinesis Savant Elite2 foot pedals in their Acuson family of ultrasound systems for hands-free image capture actions, making technicians more comfortable and productive during long shifts.
Creative and Technical Audio Production
Whether you are working in a professional studio or performing live on stage, a programmable USB foot pedal can give you an extra hand when you need it most. These devices are incredibly effective when paired with a digital audio workstation (DAW) to control media playback, initiate recordings, or toggle audio effects on the fly.
If your music software supports standard keyboard shortcuts and your computing device has an available USB port, you can pair it with a foot pedal. Pedals are also excellent as hands-free page-turners for virtual sheet music. Reviewers tracking voice recordings, such as audiophile Andy Chen from The Gadgeteer, note that mapping pedals to functions like Pause (“P”) and Record (“R”) eliminates the need to constantly turn away from a microphone to face the keyboard and screen.
High-Performance Ergonomics for Transcriptionists
Professional transcriptionists don’t need to be told the benefits of using their feet. With a specialized USB foot pedal, you can utilize a single device that pairs across all of your transcription software programs to support critical hotkey commands. Users can custom program the hardware in an instant for Play/Pause, Fast Forward, and Rewind functions.
Unlike many alternative ergonomic pedals on the market, Kinesis uses a front-hinged design. This allows your foot to comfortably rest on the pedal so you don’t have to continuously press-and-hold to sustain an action. You can even adjust the physical position of the outer two pedals and modify the activation force for maximum long-term comfort. These Savant Elite2 pedals work seamlessly with Express Scribe, Transcribe by Wreally, Quikscribe by Digital Dictation, Gear Buddy, and more. All pedals come with a 2-year limited warranty and are rated for 1 million activation cycles.
Advanced Assistive Technology Interfaces
The Savant Elite2 Control Module is an ideal Computer Switch Interface that can be paired with a wide array of assistive switches on the market today. This creates a powerful operational tool for individuals who are unable to use a conventional keyboard and mouse.
Simply plug your third-party switch into one of the available 3.5mm mini-phono jacks on the SE2 Control Module. The module is available with either two or four jacks for use with up to four distinct switches. All custom programming is saved directly to the module itself, not the host computer, ensuring maximum portability and versatility across different workstations.
To assign custom actions to each of the inputs, users can utilize the SmartSet programming app to assign any keyboard action or mouse click to each jack on the control module switch. You can save different profiles for different users or specialized applications, and switch between them in a matter of moments.
Mitigating Mouse Click Sensitivity and Strain
Mouse clicking is one of the most repetitive computer tasks we perform, yet we largely take it for granted. Mousing causes physical pain for many individuals, and frequently it is the repetitive clicking action—not the physical movement of the mouse—that is the main culprit.
The Savant Elite2 Foot Pedals come factory programmed to activate both left and right mouse clicks. Using a dedicated foot pedal for clicking tasks allows users to offload some or all of the click workload, drastically reducing the repetitive strain and burden placed on your fingers throughout the day.
Competitive PC Gaming and Call Center Efficiency
Gamers will do anything to get a competitive edge. Incorporating a USB foot pedal for gaming gives you the ability to perform more actions per second (APS) and take your mechanics to the next level. Gaming pedals can be utilized to launch specific attacks, reload or cycle through weapons, quickly take screenshots, or trigger powerful, multi-key macros. Foot pedals are also highly beneficial for live streamers, offering hands-free camera switching and microphone muting capabilities. No matter what game you play, a programmable pedal can help you level up.
Similarly, for call center employees who spend long hours on the phone collecting and entering data, a foot pedal serves as a massive productivity booster. Assigning the Enter key, Tab key, or standard mouse clicks to a foot pedal gives your team the ability to use their feet to navigate between data fields. This leads to faster, more accurate data entry while keeping employees comfortable, healthy, and ergonomically aligned.
Choosing the Right Foot Pedal for Your Setup
Kinesis manufactures three distinct families of foot pedals designed for different hardware environments and software applications. Each pedal family uses the same low-profile ergonomic design with adjustable pedal force. The Dual and Triple pedal models are securely mounted on a heavy-steel base to ensure absolute stability and long-term durability.
Savant Elite2 Programmable USB Pedals
The Savant Elite2 (SE2) family of programmable foot pedals represents the most versatile and powerful tier of foot switches available. These USB devices do not require special software drivers and are natively compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome operating systems. Each individual pedal can be custom programmed to output single key actions, complex macros, multimedia commands, and mouse actions.
Programming custom pedal actions is quick and easy using the SE2 SmartSet Programming Application for Mac and Windows. Because pedal actions are saved directly to the foot pedal’s onboard memory, your configurations move with the hardware. There are seven different Savant Elite models to choose from depending on your specific layout preferences and how many pedals your workflow requires.
JSB Joystick Pedals
The JSB line of USB foot pedals is engineered specifically for specialty industrial applications, such as camera control or gaming simulators that require non-keyboard joystick button actions. These pedals natively output standard joystick buttons 1, 2, and 3, and they are fixed non-programmable devices.
Advantage2 Keyboard Pedals
Kinesis also designs a third dedicated line of foot pedals built specifically to interface with the popular Advantage2 ergonomic keyboard series. These specialized foot pedals do not use a standard USB connection and cannot be plugged directly into a PC. Instead, they connect directly to an Advantage2 keyboard via a standard RJ11 telephone-type connector. The foot pedal is programmed directly as an extension of the keyboard itself, allowing users to execute single key actions, deploy macros, or quickly access the embedded keypad layer. They are available in both single and triple pedal configurations.
References
- Kinesis Ergonomics. (2024). Foot Pedal Solutions for Enterprise and Productivity. Kinesis-Ergo.
- Grimm, A. (2015). How a Keyboard Changed What I Look for in an Editor. Virtuous Code.
- Chen, A. (2016). Kinesis Savant Elite2 Dual Pedal Review. The Gadgeteer.