When it comes to walking and texting at the same time, most people are aware there are some risks to it, especially if you are texting while walking in a congested area.
As each generation becomes more attached to mobile phones, it is increasingly common to see people using devices in public.
We have been warned for years about the dangers of texting while driving but there is little conversation about the dangers of texting while walking.
A peer-reviewed experimental study by Neuroscience Research Australia at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) was conducted to figure out the real dangers of texting and walking.
Senior author Matthew Brodie said he wanted to research how risky it was to text and walk simultaneously because to him it seemed about “80 per cent of people”, may have their heads down while texting.
Are the dangers real or imagined?
Mr Brodie had a simple but important question when conducting the research: “Was walking and texting at the same time safe?”
“I wanted to know if these dangers are real or imagined and to measure the risk in a repeatable way,” he said.
Mr Brodie and his co-author Yoshiro Okubo recruited 50 healthy young adults from UNSW to take part in a walking-while-texting experiment for their research.
What the experiment involved
The 50 students were asked to perform six walking tasks and one seated task in a random order.
In the experiment, the authors of the study created a tiled hazard walkway at Neuroscience Research Australia’s gait laboratory.
A 10 metre walkway was made up of 50 centimetre by 50 centimetre wooden decking tiles and 10 vinyl targets, which were laid on the walkway for participants to step on.
