Background: With the development of science and technology, smartphones have been deeply involved in people's everyday lives, and many perform various tasks simultaneously on smartphones.
Objective: To investigate gait pattern changes on performing multitask simultaneously when using smartphones.
Methods: Three tasks were performed by 26 healthy adults. In the first, participants were directed to walk without using smartphones (single-task). In the second, they were required to walk while finding applications (dual-task). Lastly, in addition to performing the second task, they were asked to listen to questions and answer them on their smartphone (triple-task). Spatiotemporal variables of gait and degree of lateral deviation during walking were measured.
Results: The results showed that there was a significant difference between the single-task and dual tasks, as well as between the single task and triple task in all variables (p < 0.05). In particular, gait velocity decreased by 33.49% in the dual task and 41.69% in the triple task compared to the single-task, the degree of deviation increased by 119.18% in the dual task and 122.67% in the triple task in comparison to the single-task.
Conclusions: It was determined that changes in gait, appear when walk while using smartphones in comparison to walking without using smartphones.
Keywords: Dual-task; gait analysis; spatiotemporal parameters; triple-task.