Sure, Pokémon GO Gets People Outdoors And Moving, But Sometimes They Move Right Into Traffic

This was bound to happen.

In the last couple of weeks, reports of three motor vehicle accidents tied to Pokémon GO have appeared in the medical literature. Given that Apple says Pokémon GO was downloaded more times in its first week than any other app in its first week, you have to wonder how many more game-related
motor vehicle accidents have not been appeared in the medical literature.

After all, the authors of a research letter last month in JAMA Internal Medicine wrote that, via Google, they had found news stories about 14 different crashes caused by Pokémon GO in just 10 days in July. The authors pointed out that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among 16- to 24-year-olds, whom Pokémon GO targets. The letter’s authors cite a recent American Automobile Association report noting that six out of 10 crashes among teen drivers involve distractions within six seconds of the accident. 
More recently, a pair of University of Arizona surgeons, writing in Oxford Medical Case Reports, described two accidents whose victims showed up at their hospital’s emergency department in Tucson:

The first case involved four people–the 19-year-old driver of a pickup truck and the three people who were riding on on the bed of the pickup, which, surprisingly, appears to be perfectly legal in a bunch of states, including Arizona.

The pickup driver told emergency department staff that he was “hunting Pokémon” while driving and got distracted when he found one “sitting across the road,” directly in his path. He said he tried to “flick his Pokémon ball to capture the Pokémon” and lost control of his truck, rolling it and ejecting the three passengers riding on its bed. They had to roll the truck off of him. CT scans showed that the driver, who was alert when he got to the hospital, had a small area of bleeding in his brain and a tear in his liver. One of his passengers had a couple of cuts in his scalp, while the other two, amazingly, were not injured.

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If you think this looks like an accident waiting to happen, you might not be far off. Reports of Pokemon GO-related motor vehicle accidents are beginning to appear in the medical literature.  (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

In the other Arizona case, a 58-year-old woman slammed her car into a utility pole after swerving to avoid hitting a pedestrian. Bystanders and emergency medical personnel said the uninjured pedestrian had wondered into the middle of the street to catch a Pokémon. The poor driver, who complained of severe pelvic pain, suffered multiple pelvic fractures in the accident.
Dr. David Armstrong, a coauthor of the case report, told me that doctors are seeing an increasing number of injuries related to what he calls “cyber-induced inattention.”
“We are at constant cognitive war between our desire to stay connected and our desire to focus on a consistent, coherent stream of thought,”  Armstrong said. “These apps, whether for work or for play, are revolutionary and, frankly miraculous. They make our lives better in the aggregate.” The problem, he said, is that our brains haven’t adapted to the rapidly evolving technology.
The third recently published game-related case, described in the journal Clinical Pediatrics by Louisiana State University doctors, involved a 13-year-old boy who was chasing Pokémon while riding his bike. To make matters worse, he was not wearing a helmet. As he looked down at his cell phone screen to locate his next catch, he crossed a busy intersection without stopping to check the traffice. You probably know where this is going: Before he made it to the other side of the street, a truck hit him, leaving him unconscious for about half an hour. He had to be airlifted to a local trauma center.

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