Cellphone-related head injuries became more common after the iPhone was released
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20996107/iphone-cellphone-head-injuries-more-common
Reported today in The Verge.
Cellphone-related head injuries became more common after the iPhone was released
As cellphones got smarter, they also became marginally more dangerous to the clumsy, easily distracted humans holding them, according to new research. Before phones came loaded with perilous pings from Twitter, read receipts, or news alerts, the researchers found, they posed less of a risk to the integrity of their users' faces.
Around 2007 - the year the first iPhone was released - the number of head injuries caused by cellphones spiked, according to this new study, which was published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery. That number has continued to rise over the past decade. "The phone went from being a phone to being a mobile platform," says study author Boris Paskhover, a head and neck surgeon at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Old-school phones didn't distract people so much that they tripped and cut their eyelids. They also didn't slip out of people's hands and fall on their noses, and they didn't contain the medical hazard that is Pokémon Go. Smartphones, though, do. "People stopped being aware of their surroundings," he says.
Paskhover pulled data from between 1998 and 2017 on cellphone-related injuries to the head and neck from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) database, which holds information about injuries treated in emergency departments at around 100 United States hospitals. Then, the team used that information to estimate the total number of cellphone-related injuries in the country.
The 100 hospitals in the database reported 2,501 cases of cellphone-related injuries between 1998 and 2017, which the authors estimate is the equivalent of just over 76,000 injuries nationwide during that same time