Don't wear these while walking or you will be killed.

Wearing headphones may get you killed if you’re a pedestrian.  That’s according to a new study published in the online journal Injury Prevention.  In 2004-05, 16 people were seriously injured or killed by cars while wearing headphones.  In 2010-11, 47 pedestrians were turned into street pizza thanks to the sound-insulating capacity of their favorite headphones.  The deaths of headphone-wearing pedestrians have tripled in only six years.

“Sensory deprivation that results from using headphones with electronic devices may be a unique problem in pedestrian incidents, where auditory cues can be more important than visual ones,” wrote the researchers, led by Richard Lichenstein of the University of Maryland Hospital for Children.

Indeed, 34 of the 116 cases of pedestrians being struck by cars mentioned sirens, horns, or some other kind of auditory warning system being sounded in an attempt to alert the oncoming foot traffic.  Given the sensitive nature of the human year, you’d think it would be able to hear both music and sounds around it, but that’s not the case given the deafness-level sound the average person using an iPod has reverberating within their ear canals.

Tags: headphones, walking while wearing headphones, pedestrians who wear headphones die at a higher rate, pedestrian deaths, headphone death risk increases, the number of pedestrians killed wearing headphones has tripled in 5 years, Injury Prevention, Richard Lichenstein, the University of Maryland Hospital for Children

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