Walking with a smartphone in hand affects the way you walk – 02/21/2024 – Balance

Spend time on any crowded sidewalk and you’ll see heads tilted and eyes looking down. A recent study of college students found that a quarter of people crossing intersections were glued to a smartphone.

“I don’t think people are aware of how distracted they are and how much their situational awareness changes when they’re walking and using a phone,” said Wayne Giang, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Florida who has examined the link between phone use and phone and walking injuries.

In fact, our devices can cause what some experts call “inatentional blindness.” Another study found that participants were half as likely to even notice a clown on a unicycle — a playful touch — while walking and talking on the phone.

But the screen at hand isn’t just diverting attention. It also changes your mood, your way of walking and your posture — and makes it difficult to get from point A to point B without taking risks.

How a phone interferes with your walking

When we walk and use a phone at the same time, Giang said, we reflexively adjust how we move. Video footage of pedestrians showed that people on their phones walked about 10% slower than their non-distracted counterparts.

“You see a series of changes in walking that reflect deceleration,” said Patrick Crowley, a project manager at the Technical University of Denmark who has studied the biomechanics of walking while using a phone. “People take shorter steps and spend more time with both feet on the ground.”

These changes can disrupt sidewalk traffic. And if walking makes up a large portion of daily physical activity, walking more slowly can have negative effects on fitness, adds Elroy Aguiar, assistant professor of exercise science at the University of Alabama.

Looking down at a smartphone while walking — rather than standing up straight — also tends to increase the load, or force, placed on the muscles of the neck and upper back, and can contribute to symptoms of “text neck.” And research in the journal Gait & Posture suggests all of this could reduce balance and increase the risk of trips or falls.

Interference with mood

When scientists want to study stress, they often ask people to multitask. That’s because multitasking is a reliable way to stress people out.

There is evidence that walking while using a phone works this way too, even if we aren’t aware of it. One experiment found that the more people used a phone while walking on a treadmill, the more their levels of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, tended to rise.

A 2023 study examined the psychological effects of walking in an outdoor park while looking, or not looking, at a phone. “Usually when people go for a walk they feel better afterwards, and that’s what we saw in the group that walked without a phone,” said Elizabeth Broadbent, one of the study’s authors and a professor of health psychology at the University of Auckland in New York. Zealand.

“In the group that walked with a phone, these effects were reversed,” he added. “Instead of feeling more optimistic after walking, people felt less positive — less excited, less happy, less relaxed.”

She and her study co-authors attributed these negative effects to a decreased connection to the environment — it is now widely accepted that walking in natural spaces is good for mental health. “It seems that to get these benefits, it’s important that your attention is on your surroundings rather than your phone,” she said. It’s also possible, she added, that walking around and trying to use a phone is just plain annoying, which is why it ruins your mood.

The dangers of being distracted

Most of us understand that walking and using a phone can be risky. Some cities, like Honolulu in the United States, have even passed laws to curb distracted pedestrians. But research into these dangers has revealed some surprises.

Giang’s work examined the connection between “distracted phone walking” and emergency room visits. Using government data from 2011 to 2019, he and his colleagues found nearly 30,000 injuries caused while hiking. While many of these accidents occurred on streets and sidewalks, nearly a quarter happened at home. Tripping over something or falling down the stairs is a real risk, the researcher said.

Age was one of the main risk factors for injuries when using a phone, according to the study. Young people aged 11 to 20 had the highest proportion of injuries, followed by adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s — perhaps because young people use cell phones more than older people, according to him.

So how to stay safe? If you want to check your phone, Giang recommended stopping for a moment — preferably out of the way of other pedestrians. If you are going to walk and use the device at the same time, he advises avoiding it when you are near stairs, crosswalks and uneven terrain, places where, according to research, accidents are more likely to occur.

“Even alert and conscious people get hurt while walking,” he added. “If you’re distracted by a phone, you’re definitely putting yourself at some risk.”