Walking stability during cell phone use in healthy adults

Abstract

The number of falls and/or accidental injuries associated with cellular phone use during walking is growing rapidly. Understanding the effects of concurrent cell phone use on human gait may help develop safety guidelines for pedestrians. It was shown previously that older adults had more pronounced dual-task interferences than younger adults when concurrent cognitive task required visual information processing. Thus, cell phone use might have greater impact on walking stability in older than in younger adults. This study examined gait stability and variability during a cell phone dialing task (phone) and two classic cognitive tasks, the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT) and Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT). Nine older and seven younger healthy adults walked on a treadmill at four different conditions: walking only, PASAT, phone, and SDMT. We computed short-term local divergence exponent (LDE) of the trunk motion (local stability), dynamic margins of stability (MOS), step spatiotemporal measures, and kinematic variability. Older and younger adults had similar values of short-term LDE during all conditions, indicating that local stability was not affected by the dual-task. Compared to walking only, older and younger adults walked with significantly greater average mediolateral MOS during phone and SDMT conditions but significantly less ankle angle variability during all dual-tasks and less knee angle variability during PASAT. The current findings demonstrate that healthy adults may try to control foot placement and joint kinematics during cell phone use or another cognitive task with a visual component to ensure sufficient dynamic margins of stability and maintain local stability.

Cellular Telephone Dialing Influences Kinematic and Spatiotemporal Gait Parameters in Healthy Adults

“…Also, a recent dual-task study involving texting noted changes in muscle activation patterns that would function to increase ankle stability during weight transfer (Agostini et al, 2015), and texting as well as performing a math task lead to increased step frequency, step time, double support time, lateral deviation, and obstacle clearance which was interpreted as a more cautious gait pattern (Licence et al, 2015). These results corroborate a recent study which found that texting while walking lead to increased stride width (Schabrun, van den Hoorn, Moorcroft, Greenland, & Hodges, 2014) and is furthered supported by our recent analyses which revealed that the mediolateral margin of stability was greater and local stability was not compromised by a cell phone dialing task while walking (Kao, Higginson, Seymour, Kamerdze, & Higginson, 2015). However, the results are inconsistent with those of Lim, Amado, Sheehan, and Van Emmerik (2015), who found that texting while walking resulted in greater stride length, stride width variability, and total mediolateral excursion of the pelvis, but no change in stride width in a group of young healthy adults (M age D 20 years).The effect of dual tasking on stride width was not different between the two age groups in our study.…”

Gait parameters are differently affected by concurrent smartphone-based activities with scaled levels of cognitive effort

“…These studies all confirm that smartphone use affects gait kinematics and may compromise walking stability [13,14], thus increasing the risk of falls. Indeed, the risk of falling or tripping is associated with variations of spatio-temporal parameters, such as gait speed [15], and using non-preferred gait patterns has been shown to induce an increased risk [16].…”

Effects of Active Workstation Use on Walking Mechanics and Work Efficiency

“…Hausdorff et al [27] previously reported that walking while successfully performing a secondary cognitive task was dependent on a maintaining consistent gait pattern so that executive function specific to the secondary task can be emphasized. It may be that kinematic alterations that occur during initial use of an active workstation are dependent on the visual attention required for the secondary (computer mousing) task [28]. This may pose a potential threat to maintaining stability during walking, which could explain the kinematic differences we observed between TW and WC.…”