The Effects of Walking While Texting on Gait Characteristics

A common activity that students perform on Iowa State’s campus is texting while walking. This may be a concern because when we simultaneously walk and text, the risks of injury and accidents increase due to the fact that we aren’t fully aware of our environment. With this project, I wanted to see if we could observe any biomechanical differences. Past research shows that texting significantly decreases walking speed, so I hypothesized that the same will happen in this project. However, I also wanted to see if parameters such as center of pressure (COP) and time to boundary (TTB) would be affected. These will give us an indication if trips or falls are likely to occur. Ten students who attend Iowa State University were recruited for this study. We had them perform four different walking conditions with three trials each: normal walking, slow walking, holding a cell phone as if they were texting, and texting while walking. We simply asked them to walk across the lab onto a force platform and then continue until their stride was complete. After analysis we found out that stance time, TTB, and COP displacement were significantly higher when participants walked and texted simultaneously