Study Finds People Injured While Wearing Headphones Triples in Six Years

A new study done by the University of Maryland Hospital for children has found that the number of people injured while wearing headphones or other types of musical earpieces has tripled in just six years. The increase is attributed to the increased use of iPods and especially the more recent ability to listen to music on a cell phone. The group has published the results of their study in the health journal Injury Prevention.

Suspecting that children in particular were becoming more vulnerable to becoming a victim of an accident when wearing headphones, the research team created a database from data in other hospital databases all across the country and used it to create a new database that they could search for details about whether accidents involved the use of headphones. They also looked at Product Safety Commission reports, listings from Google News, and medical archives from hospitals that didn't have historic accident data.

After amassing all the data, the team then began running search requests and found that of victims that had been wearing headphones, 68% were male and 67% of all victims were under age thirty. They also found that virtually all reported cases that involved headphones also involved automobiles and/or trains and of course pedestrians. In all cases where trains were involved, the accidents that ensured were of automobiles being run into by trains where the driver apparently didn't realize a train was coming and subsequently crossed the tracks.

Because the researchers were all doctors they knew before going into the study that most pedestrian/vehicle accident reports don't note whether the pedestrian was wearing headphones or not, which caused them to discard such statistics from their study.

The one statistic that stood out above all however was the one that described the total overall number of people involved in accidents that were wearing headphones. It showed a six fold increase in the number of such accidents over just a six year time span. Though they obviously cannot prove that the accidents happened because the victims were wearing headphones, they do suggest that such is the case due to the overwhelming evidence.

The authors also note that there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that such injuries occur not simply because the person wearing them cannot hear noises that might alert them to impending danger, but that wearing headphones causes an isolating effect that causes other senses to become numbed to the local surrounding environment. It's that isolation that causes people to not notice things that they would were they fully engaged in what they were doing.

The team recommends that people cease wearing headphones while driving automobiles, bicycles or any other type of moving vehicle, or when on foot crossing streets.