Effects of mobile texting and gaming on gait with obstructions under different illumination levels

Abstract

Objective: This study was conducted to test the effects of mobile texting and gaming on gait with obstructions under different illumination levels. Design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: Twelve healthy adults aged 20 to 36 years (mean 23.5 years) were tested under six different conditions. All participants used touchscreen smartphones. Testing conditions included: 1) Walking with an obstruction under a bright illumination level; 2) walking with an obstruction with a low level of illumination; 3) walking with an obstruction while texting under a bright illumination level; 4) walking with an obstruction while texting with a low level of illumination; 5) walking with an obstruction while gaming under a bright illumination level; and 6) walking with an obstruction while gaming with a low level of illumination. All participants were asked to text the Korean national anthem by their own phone and play Temple Run 2 using an iPhone 5. Gait variances were measured over a distance of 3 m, and the mean value after three trials was used. A gait analyzer was used to measure the data. Results: Compared to normal gait with obstruction, gait speed, step length, stride length, step time, stride time, cadence while texting and gaming showed significant differences (p<0.05). Differences between the illumination levels included gait speed, step length, stride length, and step time (p<0.05) with no significant differences in stride time and cadence. Conclusions: Dual-tasking using a smartphone under low levels of illumination lowers the quality of gait with obstructions.

Possibility of Using Entropy Method to Evaluate the Distracting Effect of Mobile Phones on Pedestrians

“…Texting involves reading and typing, which is more cognitively demanding than talking [11]. Similar to texting, replying to emails and gaming also require cognitive attention that may take a serious toll on safe pedestrian behavior [13,14].…”

“…The common parameters in the reviewed studies are: gait phase [16], gait velocity [6,16], gait speed [14,[17][18][19], gait cycle [17], cadence [12,14,17,18], stride velocity [12], stride time [12,14,17], stride length [12,14,17,18,20], step time [14,17,21], step length [14,17,21,22], single support [17], and double support [17,18,22]. Other than the common parameters, the reviewed studies also used the other gait parameters: range of motion [20,23], local stability and margin of stability [21].…”

Effects of the use of mobile phone on postural and locomotor tasks: a scoping review

“…Compared to the same postural-locomotor task without using a mobile phone, texting mainly induced a slowdown and increased instability when walking on the ground [7,[13][14][15]20,21,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], on a treadmill [7,[32][33][34][35], with obstacles [36][37][38][39][40][41][42] and on an inclined plane (only when going downhill) [43].…”

Watch Out! Modelling Pedestrians with Egocentric Distractions

“…For a pedestrian agent reading, the preferred speed is set to 1.144 m/s (88%) [Niederer et al 2018;Schabrun et al 2014]. For a distracted agent texting, the preferred speed is set to 1.04 m/s or (80%) [Agostini et al 2015;Cha et al 2015;Haga et al 2015;Licence et al 2015;Pizzamiglio et al 2017;Plummer et al 2015;Prupetkaew et al 2019;Schabrun et al 2014;Yu et al 2015]. Further research may be needed to determine distributions for values for these parameters as they relate to age, sex, culture, etc.…”