An email from our friend Dr. Joel Moskowitz
During the past year, I've done several journal reviews of papers on smartphone addiction among young adults. The studies were conducted in different countries. The wireless industry claims to have sold more than one billion smartphones last year. Thus smartphone addiction is quickly becoming a global public health issue. Now for some anecdotal observations ... Yesterday, I observed student cell phone-related behavior while walking across the UC Berkeley campus to do a lecture on the health risks of cell phones. More than half of the students I passed were carrying or connected to a smart phone. Eighteen students carried the smart phone in their hand while they walked and were not using it. Eighteen students were wearing a wired headset connected to a device in their pants pocket. I could not tell whether or how they were using this device (which was likely a smart phone) as I kept walking. Finally, seven students were on a phone call holding their smart phone next to their ear. While waiting outside a lecture hall for the prior class to leave, I observed many undergraduates browsing their smartphones to fill the time before their next class. As the lecture hall emptied out, many students pulled out their smartphones as soon as they exited the hall. If we rolled the clock back to 1960, what would I have observed walking across campus? Would many of the students I described above been smoking cigarettes? *Have we substituted one addiction for an another? Has the smart phone replaced the cigarette?* BTW, I am proud to say that the UC Berkeley campus, along with the other UC campuses, has a tobacco-free policy. I did not observe any tobacco use on my trek across campus. -- A link to the news story which appeared in *The Guardian* yesterday and to the study abstract can be found on the *Electromagnetic Radiation Safety *web site at http://bit.ly/smartphonecigarette. Note: I don't have access to this journal, and this was not one of the papers I reviewed so I cannot attest to its methodology. -- Joel M. Moskowitz, Ph.D., Director Center for Family and Community Health School of Public Health University of California, Berkeley *Electromagnetic Radiation Safety*