<b>Effects of Smartphone Use on Behavior While Walking </b>

Abstract

There is an annually increasing trend in the number of people who must be taken to a hospital by ambulance following an accident related to smartphone use while walking, making this practice a significant social issue. In recent years, location information games using augmented reality have grown in popularity around the world, and so the risk of collisions or accidents arising from smartphone use while walking is increasing. For the present study, we focused on changes in the behavior of those who walk while using a smartphone to quantitatively verify the increased risk of collision, and conducted walking experiments using an eye mark recorder and an accelerometer. We first looked at the movement of the walkers' point of visual focus, and found that those who walk while web browsing or texting visually confirm the path ahead only about 30% of their total walking time, and that for the visual field, their lateral range in particular was greatly decreased. Further, this tendency did not change with increases or decreases in pedestrian traffic, which revealed that those who walk while using a smartphone do not adjust their level of forward visual confirmation regardless of changes in pedestrian traffic density. Next, analyses were conducted of walkers' avoidance and speed reducing behaviors. It was found that, as pedestrian traffic density increased, a greater acceleration was seen in the lateral and forward directions. It was clarified that, particularly when walking while texting, accelerations in the lateral direction and forward direction at 0.2 persons/m 2 were 1.6 times and roughly twice as high respectively than acceleration at 0.0 persons/m 2 .

Between Post-Flâneur and Smartphone Zombie: Smartphone Users’ Altering Visual Attention and Walking Behavior in Public Space

“…Different smartphone activities lead to different effects on visual attention. Previous studies revealed that the most common activities, such as reading and typing, proved to be the most distractive modes of using smartphones while walking [12,13,17,19,23,24,27,29]. Our findings reinforce this finding, since 64.9% of typers and readers we observed in this study were defined as smartphone zombies ( Table 5).…”

“…There is still a relatively small number of studies on smartphone use in public spaces. These observation-based studies examine the changing walking behavior of smartphone users in real-world public spaces based on egocentric [15] or pre-scripted walking experiences [19].…”

Wide-View Sidewalk Dataset Based Pedestrian Safety Application

“…In the actual evaluation process, it is complicated and unrealistic to record the 4-time points for every object of each class. As shown in Fig.2 (a) and (b), the Inefficiency of an object can be estimated by (2).…”

“…That is the minimum value of P. Then the maximum value of L FOV can be obtained by (6), which is the most suitable L FOV needed. Finally, the θ FOV can be calculated by (2).…”

“…The number of pedestrian accidents is increasing rapidly recently. People who use smartphones while walking are called phubbers [1] and they are more easily stricken by a sidewalk accident [2]. Statistics suggest that an average of 1 person dies every 1.5 hours from pedestrian accidents in the US in 2016 [3], [4].…”