Texting while driving is clearly a bad idea, but it may be dangerously distracting while walking, too, a new study suggests.

Researchers asked 30 people to navigate an obstacle course three times and found they were significantly slower while texting and walking than when completing the route without any distractions.

When the researchers had people walk, text and do math quizzes on an iPhone all at the same time, it also slowed them down by about the same amount.

The lower speed was expected, said senior study author Conrad Earnest, an exercise researcher at Texas A&M University in College Station. What was surprising, however, is that staring at the tiny screen didn’t make people any more likely to crash into things.

“Despite our efforts to test the risk for tripping, participants could have been extra aware” of their surroundings, he said by email.

To see how texting and other distractions influenced walking skills, Earnest and colleagues used motion-detection equipment to analyze gait, speed and collisions with obstacles, they report in the journal PLOS ONE.

Participants had an average course completion time of 19:32 seconds when all they had to do was walk. Adding texting to the mix slowed typical times down to 24:96 seconds, while texting and answering math questions yielded times of about 24:09 seconds.

With the added complexity of using the tiny screen, people also took shorter strides.

The walkers slowed when approaching steps, platforms and stairs.

Texting and fielding math problems on the phones made people swerve more from side to side, but the difference wasn’t big enough to rule out the possibility that it was due to chance.

Recognizing they were distracted probably caused people to move more cautiously through the course, said David Schwebel, a psychology researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who wasn’t involved in the study.

It’s also possible that the lack of crashes on the course show that humankind has already adapted to walking while texting, said Dr. Aimee Edell, a researcher at San Ramon Medical Center in California. 

-Reuters