Abstract
Background: Smartphones using is growing up worldwide, they were used by 1.85 billion people in 2014 and expected to be 2.87 billion in 2020. Just over 36% of the world's population is projected to use a smartphone by 2018, up from about 10% in 2011. Saudi Arabia specifically has more than 44 million mobile phone subscribers and 88% rate of smartphone ownership, which is almost double the international average.
Aim: This study aims to determine the impact of smartphones on eye health among health sciences students in Taibah University.
Method: This is a cross-sectional study conducted on health science students at Taibah University in AL-Medina Saudi Arabia during 2019. The data analysis performed by using Statistical Packages for Social Sciences [SPSS] version 21. Patient characteristics were conducted using descriptive statistics where numbers and percentages and mean +/- standard deviation were used to presents all study results.
Results: There were 650 participants who were recruited in this study. Age range was from 17 to 56 years old, mean 21.8 [SD 2.4]. Females were dominant against males [61.8% vs 38.2%] where most of them were medical students [65.1%]. Many participants spend long duration of Smartphone used per day [>3 hours] with 78.0% and nearly all participants were using smartphone before bed [97.7%] while 72.7% used smartphone 30 minutes or more before going to sleep. Using smartphone before bed and painful or sore eyes were identified as the significant factors of prolong used of smartphone that affected eyes health.
Conclusion: In this study, 4 out 5 students have used smartphone more than three hours per day. This clearly indicates that smartphone conquers a greater part of everyday life. We also revealed that using smart phone before bed and pain or sore eyes as the significant factors of prolong used of smartphone that affects eyes health.