Lower limb kinematics, coordination and muscular activity responses to mobile phone use during gait

In recent years, people rarely merely walk, but rather interact with their cellphones while walking [1]. Vision control impairment and additional cognitive demands are the most crucial impacts of mobile phone use, which cause deficits in walking performance [2]. There is a scarcity of research on synchronized analysis of lower limb kinematics, coordination, and muscle activity responses to mobile phone use during gait in the literature. How do lower limb kinematics, coordination and muscle activity pattern change in response to mobile phone use during walking? Twenty-eight healthy adults (11 females; 27.46±4.47 years; 70.12±14.38 Kg; 173.28±11.13 cm) walked over treadmill at their desired pace. Kinematics and muscular activity data were collected during four walking conditions on treadmill: Normal walking (NW), walking and talking on a call (WT), walking while listening to music (WL), and walking while working with a preferred mobile phone application (WW). One-Way repeated measure ANOVA (SPM1d) was used to analyse gait spatiotemporal parameters, lower limb joints kinematics (time-series of joint range of motions), coordination (continuous relative phase analysis of hip-knee, knee-ankle and hip-ankle joints) and muscular activities (time-series of activity percentage) in each condition [3]. Findings indicated that stride time during WW (1.096±0.049) and WL (1.098±0.051) was significantly lower compared to NW (1.114±0.049). In addition, stride time variability was significantly less in WT (0.022±0.005) compared to NW (0.022±0.005). WT resulted in a reduced hip flexion compared to all other conditions, and in altered knee angles compared to NW, and WW. We also observed a decreased activity of the Medial Gastrocnemius muscle during WT, and WW when compared to NW. Lower limb coordination and its variability were not affected by the different walking conditions.Download : Download high-res image (364KB)Download : Download full-size image Outcomes do not support the notion that using a mobile phone has negative effects on healthy young adults’ spatiotemporal gait characteristics and gait control. It appears that healthy young adults use gait control strategies that prevent performance from negative effects of dual-task interference that may occur due to using mobile phones.