When you find a good game that gets your competitive juices flowing, it’s not uncommon to want to keep playing it for hours on end. Problem is, holding a gaming mouse and stretching your fingers across a gaming keyboard for those long periods of time aren’t the easiest things on your hands and digits. Suffice to say, at some point, you’ll feel a strain here, an aching tendon there, and all sorts of other ills. While a long break will probably be enough to get your hands back in fighting shape, let’s be honest, you’re just never going to stop playing long enough to let your hand properly recover. Might as well find something that can help hasten the recovery period and that’s what they’re bringing with the Bauhutte Hand Massager.
You know those percussive massagers that athletes use after a hard bout of training to relax their muscles, treat aches, and speed up recovery? It’s like that, except instead of targeting large muscles that you worked out to failure, it’s meant to deliver the same therapeutic massage to the smaller muscles and joints across your hands and fingers.
The Bauhutte Hand Massager is designed to sit on the desk, along with your usual gaming peripherals, allowing you to use it any time you feel the fatigue or strain catching up from all those clicking and tapping. It consists of device that looks like a giant mouse, with a wide opening at the middle where you stick your aching hand, putting each finger inside a designated slot. Once turned on, the device will activate a 15-layer airbag that individually wraps four fingers (thumb not included), while a shiatsu plate presses against the center of your palm. From there, it will commence with a pulsating action that’s meant to knead the entire hand to relive muscle fatigue.
It has three massage settings. One mode activates just the shiatsu plate, going to work on the stiffness points across the palm, while another mode activates just the airbags, which pulls and stretches each individual finger. The last mode, naturally, activates both, for a whole hand massage.
The Bauhutte Hand Massager can only work on one hand at a time, although it’s meant to fit both left and right hands alike. That means, you can still keep one hand on the mouse (or the keyboard) while the other hand gets massaged, so you don’t even have to turn off your game to actually use it. That’s right, you can get a quick massage while waiting in the lobby or waiting for the game to load. It also comes with a heater function that will warm your hands while massaging it, which, the outfit claims, will promote better blood circulation.
Since the device doesn’t include the thumb during the massage, the outfit offers a compromise if your thumb needs some work. According to the product page, you can insert your hand on the device sideways, with the thumb going into one of the finger slots, in case you’re a console gamer who’s been wielding those analog sticks for 12 hours straight.
The Bauhutte Hand Massager is available now, but only in Japan.
