A man wearing a virtual reality headset at a restaurant smacks his 6-year-old son with the controller, sending him to the hospital with an eyebrow laceration. A 21-year-old sitting on a plane is clonked on the head by a laptop falling from an overhead compartment. A 39-year-old gets the rubber tip of an earbud stuck in his ear and unsuccessfully tries to remove it with a screwdriver. And many, many people fall off hoverboards.
While gadgets and gizmos can bring joy into our lives, they also result in thousands of serious injuries each year. To determine the safety implications of the devices we frequently review, Gizmodo analyzed tech-related injuries that led to ER visits in 2023 using data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). The database tracks ER visits at a representative sample of hospitals and documents their links to a wide range of consumer products.
We examined ER visits from the database in which patients attributed their injuries to several popular consumer technologies: cell phones, drones, headsets, headphones, hoverboards, tablets, vibrators, video games, and virtual reality headsets. While NEISS uses its sampled data to calculate national estimates for the number of hospitalizations caused by consumer products, our analysis of more specific product categories offers a less authoritative and more anecdotal picture of how our favorite technologies hurt us.
Video games
Gizmodo’s not-entirely-scientific analysis shows that people who play normal video games punch inanimate objects on purpose while people who play virtual reality video games punch people by accident.
The NEISS data documents VR gamers unintentionally punching their mothers, their children, and in the case of one unlucky 12-year-old boy, punching himself in the penis. More than 64 percent of VR-related emergency room visits were the result of unintentional punching.
By contrast, rage-quitting angry punchers accounted for 5 percent of injuries involving video games that weren’t explicitly labeled VR. They stood out for their poor choices of things to punch, such as windows, mirrors, and glass tables.
A quarter of ER visits involving non-VR video games were the result of seizures or loss of consciousness, while 13 percent involved ailments like carpal tunnel, neck pain, and vision problems that patients attributed to long gaming sessions and repetitive motions. Interestingly, those serious conditions were completely absent from the VR-specific ER visits, which were all attributed to players hitting things, running into things, falling over, or developing sores from wearing headsets.
Hoverboards vs. drones
Hoverboards accounted for more ER visits in the NEISS sample than any other device we examined. People ran into every piece of furniture imaginable and fell onto every part of the body it’s possible to fall onto, especially wrists and heads (please wear a helmet when hovering). The good news is the 2023 data didn’t contain any examples of hoverboards spontaneously combusting.
Surprisingly, drones accounted for the fewest number of ER visits in our data—a suspiciously small 9 incidents.
Headphones
As if over-ear headphone lovers needed another reason to feel smug about their audiophilia, they appear significantly less likely to be injured by their devices than earbud wearers. More than 70 percent of ER visits linked to headphones were a result of plastic and rubber earbud tips becoming lodged in patients’ ears. The data suggests it’s unwise to fall asleep in earbuds or to shove other objects in your ear to get a stuck earbud tip out.
While having a cord attached to an earbud may make it easier to extract, it also presents its own risks. One 44-year-old patient scalded her hands after her headphones snagged an object while she was carrying a pot of boiling water.
Vibrators
It’s no secret, people get vibrators stuck in their bodies. But not as often as they get earbud tips stuck in their body, according to the NEISS data sample.
Cell phones
The most dangerous cell phone-related activity appears to be holding one—and then not holding it. More than 13 percent of cell phone-related ER visits in the database for 2023 were the result of users dropping their phones on their own faces, toes, or children
About 12 percent of injuries were the result of distracted users falling off bikes, stepping into potholes, and in one case walking into a metal 9/11 memorial plaque while looking at their phone instead of watching where they were going. It should go without saying that it is particularly dangerous to doomscroll while walking down a flight of stairs.
Swiping broken screens accounted for 7 percent of phone ER visits and falling out of bed or a chair while reaching for a phone (who hasn’t been there?) caused 5 percent of visits.
Phone manufacturers bear some responsibility: Another 5 percent of phone-related ER trips were the result of devices electrically shocking their owners or spontaneously combusting and burning them.
And one injury appears to have been an act of god. A 48-year-old woman was sitting on the floor of her home holding her cell phone during a thunderstorm when a flash of blue lightning hit the phone and blasted it out of her hand, leaving her whole body tingly but luckily unburned.
Laptops vs. Tablets
When shopping for your next personal computer, one factor you may want to consider is that tablets caused 36 percent fewer ER visits than laptops, according to the 2023 NEISS data. The comparative heft of laptops seems to account for much of this. More than 34 percent of laptop injuries were the result of computers falling on someone’s head or feet, double the butterfingers-to-ER visit rate caused by tablets. Their larger size also makes laptops less convenient and more dangerous to travel with. Five percent of laptop injuries were caused by laptops falling out of overhead storage compartments on planes or buses.
But lighter things aren’t always safer. They become easier to throw. The NEISS data involving tablets and cell phones is rife with examples of siblings “accidentally” chucking the devices at each other.
