MouseCage

MouseCage is a lightweight software application designed to help you control your mouse cursor in case you suffer from essential tremor (ET), Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis (MS) or other conditions that may cause hand shake or tremor.

Look for the tool in your system tray

You can find the program running quietly in your system tray without distracting your attention. Right-clicking on its tray icon only gives you the possibility to exit the utility. In order to access the configuration panel, you need to open another tool separately.

How it works

MouseCage disables the mouse driver called EPP (Enhance Pointer Precision), which is responsible for controlling the mouse acceleration and changing the sensitivity of the mouse.
When it’s activated, the application reveals the standard Windows cursor and a green pointer, which actually displays your current hand movements (in case you suffer from tremor you can view some shaking motion).
The tool lets you activate a so-called ‘Cage’ mode by simply pressing a hotkey (the default one is Esc). In this particular mode the cursor turns red and your mouse movements are greatly reduced. There’s also support for a locked mode where you cannot move the cursor.

Manual mouse cursor tweaks

Several dedicated parameters are integrated for helping you adjust the mouse speed, detect the end of tremor (fast, default, slow), and assign hotkeys for various actions, such as activate the ‘Cage’ mode, close or minimize the window, and simulate the right-mouse button.
What’s more, you can make the application blink the cursor. You may adjust the blink rate and change the green pointer size. Last but not least, you can run the utility at Windows startup, activate a single-click mode, and reset all settings to default.

Bottom line

All things considered, MouseCage comes with several handy features for helping you control your mouse cursor if you have hand tremor problems. On the downside, it hasn’t been updated for a long time, so you can make use of its capabilities especially if you are the owner of an old operating system, such as Windows 2K, XP, Vista or 2003.