Which of Your Devices Is Most Likely to Injure You?
Sure, we all damage our electronics. We drop them, step on them, and spill food and drinks on them. But how often do they hurt us back? Quite a bit, as it turns out.
Tech enthusiast site Electronics Hub(Opens in a new window) dug into numbers from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System(Opens in a new window) injury database—the country's official count of product-related damage to humans—and put together a chart of the 27 most dangerous electronic devices, along with charted their likelihood to maim, lacerate, and sprain.
The data was collected over a 5-year span (2017 to 2021) and crunched in November 2022; the dataset weightings mean most of these results are estimates.
The biggest news comes as no shock: Smartphones caused 34,443 painful incidents in the US in 2021. That's more than any other device and up a bit from 2020. The highest was in 2019, before the pandemic—so maybe injuries went down as people stayed home with their phones.
Take into account that the "injuries" reported aren't all people walking into walls or falling into manholes while texting, and almost none are from batteries exploding. They include such maladies as "smartphone pinky" and "text claw"—problems only a smartphone could cause(Opens in a new window).
What else in the digital world is out to get you? Check out the full injury count for the 27 products below, ranging from the safe (microphones hurt only 32 people) to the scary and deadly (large-screen TVs smacked 30,408 people).
The major trends in tech injury:
VR headsets went from causing only 257 injuries in 2020 up to 1,374 the next year, a 530% jump. Tech that blinds you probably should come with extra padding.
Drone injuries hit an all-time high of 939 in 2021, worse than
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