Public Health

Are touchscreens worse than cell phones for road safety?

The answer is ‘yes’ based on recent research from Neale Kinnear as reviewed in The Economist. The key finding was that:

…reaction times…when the touchscreen was being employed were more than 50% longer than standard for some tasks. This was worse than the 46% impairment found in a previous simulator study looking at the effects of using a hand-held mobile phone while driving, which is banned in many countries.

One solution is increasingly rely on voice activated commands as the technology improves. Alternatively, one could go old school and bring back more knobs. Who would have thought that radio knobs could save lives.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *