Washington : Catching Pokemon while driving is not safe at all as a study reported incidents of crashes and more than 110,000 instances in just 10 days where drivers or pedestrians were distracted by Pokemon GO.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among 16 to 24-year-olds, whom the game targets, the investigators, led by John Ayers from San Diego State University, wrote in the study.
The augmented reality game, which allows players to catch and collect Pokemons in real-world locations through the mobile phone camera, has taken the youngsters by storm since its release in July. As players move, their avatar moves within the game, and players are then rewarded for collecting Pokemons placed in real-world locations.
By rewarding movement, the game incentivises physical activity. However, if players use their cars to search for Pokemon they negate any health benefit and incur serious risk, the study said.
To evaluate the risk of traffic-related incidents, Twitter postings containing the terms “Pokémon” and “driving,” “drives,” “drive,” or “car” were obtained for July 10- July 19, 2016.
A random sample of 4,000 tweets was generated, and estimates from this sample were used to create population-level estimates.
