my wife took my $5 timex watch and just put her mouse on the face of it. kinda blew my mind because her request was very out of left field. but it works!
I've never had a need for such a device, but I worked for a company that wrote Skype for Business plug-ins, many of which revolved around "presence". You were considered active on your computer[0] when your mouse moved. We had a tool that we used for billing our time which included a graph of your Skype for Business presence state for the day you were entering time for[1].
I noticed, one week, that I was active 24-hours a day for three days in a row. I discovered that I left my mouse plugged in, it had fallen onto the carpet, and the minor vibrations that would occur in the house mixed with difficulty tracking would cause the mouse to move on its own "little enough" for me to not notice but frequently enough that it kept the computer from sleeping and kept my Skype for Business state bright green.
[0] Similar to Teams, today, you could be logged in from multiple devices; unlike Teams, a toast message might not reach your phone (or appear and be dismissed immediately) if you were active on a computer.
[1] This was entirely to assist in accurately filling out time sheets; it was never used to make sure "butts were in chairs".
The mousepad itself has an eink or similar display to change it over time and have the mouse detect some motion. The "active" part is turned off (to just be a regular display) when there is pressure on the wrist rest.
The mousepad is a USB hub (to get power for itself) that you can also plug the mouse and keyboard into so that its one less cord back to the computer.
Years ago when optical nice were a new thing, I pranked my co-worker in the IT department by taping a feather to the optical sensor and then taping the mouse right behind the power supply fan on his tower PC. Then I plugged in a second mouse and put it on his desk. The constant jitter of the mouse drove him bonkers. He replaced the desk mouse several times, went back to a ball mouse and even reimaged his PC (we used Ghost back then to image the company PCs in-situ). Every time he replaced his desk mouse I thought he'd see the rogue mouse, but he always did it "blind", tracing his cable back, pulling it out and fumbling with the replacement usb plug for 5 minutes, cursing USB ports. If he once pulled out the tower or crawled back there to look he'd have seen my ruse.
I must check whether placing a mouse on laptop's screen would work. As the screen blanks out would it register as a move and the system would not lock itself?
I've never had a need for such a device, but I worked for a company that wrote Skype for Business plug-ins, many of which revolved around "presence". You were considered active on your computer[0] when your mouse moved. We had a tool that we used for billing our time which included a graph of your Skype for Business presence state for the day you were entering time for[1].
I noticed, one week, that I was active 24-hours a day for three days in a row. I discovered that I left my mouse plugged in, it had fallen onto the carpet, and the minor vibrations that would occur in the house mixed with difficulty tracking would cause the mouse to move on its own "little enough" for me to not notice but frequently enough that it kept the computer from sleeping and kept my Skype for Business state bright green.
[0] Similar to Teams, today, you could be logged in from multiple devices; unlike Teams, a toast message might not reach your phone (or appear and be dismissed immediately) if you were active on a computer.
[1] This was entirely to assist in accurately filling out time sheets; it was never used to make sure "butts were in chairs".