Using cellphone while walking is risky

On the day of the collision last month,visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair.

On the day of the collision last month,visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked,Tiffany Briggs,25,was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone,lost in conversation. I ran into a truck, Briggs said. It was parked in a driveway.

Distracted driving has gained much attention lately,but there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking distracted walking which combines a pedestrian,an electronic device and a hurdle in the path ones walking on.

The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous. Most times,the mishaps for a distracted walker are minor,like the lightly dinged head Briggs suffered. Of course,the injuries can sometimes be serious and they are on the rise.

Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped,fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007,which had nearly doubled from 2006,according to a study conducted by Ohio State University,which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.

Its the tip of the iceberg, said Jack L Nasar,a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State,noting that the number of mishaps is probably much higher considering most of the injuries are not severe enough to require a hospital visit. Nasar supervised the analysis,which looked at records of emergency room visits compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Examples of such visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion; a 28-year-old man who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and a 68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone.Young people injured themselves more often. About half the visits Troyer studied were by people under 30,and a quarter were 16 to 20 years old. But more than a quarter of those injured were 41 to 60 years old.

Ira Hyman,a psychology professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham,calls this inattention blindness, meaning a person can be looking at an object but fail to register or process it.