As more people ascend to heaven, or whatever, while photographing themselves, more researchers try to measure the what, where, and how of it. Picture, if you will, this new study done by scientists in India and the USA:
“Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and Preventing Selfie Deaths,” Hemank Lamba, Varun Bharadhwaj, Mayank Vachher, Divyansh Agarwal, Megha Arora, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, arXiv:1611.01911v2 [cs.SI] 11 Nov 2016. The authors, at Carnegie Mellon University, Indraprastha Institude of Information Technology, and the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, report:
“since March 2014, 127 people have died and many have been injured while trying to click a selfie…. In this work, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the selfie-related casualties and infer various reasons behind these deaths. We use inferences from incidents and from our understanding of the features, we create a system to make people more aware of the dangerous situations in which these selfies are taken.”
Here’s further detail:
MIT Technology Review looked over the report, and added a bit of commentary: “Data Scientists Chart the Tragic Rise of Selfie Deaths“.
UPDATE: Maggie Fox of NBC News interviewed co-author Kumaraguru.