Walk a crooked mile: the perils of using a phone while you stroll

Walking while you read, email or text on a phone is something of a national sport – but how does tending to a phone affect how we move? Researchers in Australia took a close look by monitoring 26 volunteers as they walked in a straight line for about 8.5m.

They compared how the participants moved when walking without a phone, when reading from a phone and while entering the text “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.

They found that using a phone had an effect on gait. Compared with normal walking, reading or writing on a phone slowed walking speed and affected stride frequency as well as the position and movement of the head and feet. Writing seemed to have more of an impact than reading. "While writing text, participants walked slower, deviated more from a straight line and used less neck [range of movement] than when reading text," write the researchers from the University of Queensland in the journal Plos One.

The paper also highlights the potential safety issues, particularly when you stray off course. “The gait kinematic most likely to impact on safety was the deviation from a straight walking path during typing and reading text on a mobile phone. In a pedestrian environment, inability to maintain a straight path would be likely to increase potential for collisions, trips and traffic accidents.”