The Effects of Walking While Texting on Gait Characteristics
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The Honors project is potentially the most valuable component of an Honors education. Typically Honors students choose to do their projects in their area of study, but some will pick a topic of interest unrelated to their major.
The Honors Program requires that the project be presented at a poster presentation event. Poster presentations are held each semester. Most students present during their senior year, but may do so earlier if their honors project has been completed.
This site presents project descriptions and selected posters for Honors projects completed since the Fall 2015 semester.
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Abstract
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.