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It’s getting colder and snowier, and it’s preventing my kids from being outside as much as they want. They’re getting antsy (and so am I), so I’m hoping we can take them to do more stuff outside the house. What’s the deal with trampoline parks? Are they a good option to get the sillies out, or are injuries too high a risk?
—Running Out of Ideas
The authors of this paper attempt to quantify the risk from trampoline parks. They use data from 18 trampoline parks operating in Australia and the Middle East between 2017 and 2019. What I like about this paper is that they attempt to quantify the risk per hour, so you get a real sense of not just the existence of risk, but the degree. Also, they make an effort to get really granular in the activities; is dodgeball more dangerous than the foam pit? Basically, this paper takes trampoline park injuries and gives them the attention they deserve.
The results: They’ve got 13,256 injuries reported in 8.3 million jumper-hours; of these, 11% were significant (meaning needing medical attention — a broken bone, laceration, spinal injury). This amounts to a rate of 1.14 injuries per 1,000 jumper-hours, or 0.11 serious injuries for 1,000 jumper-hours.
How large are these effects? There are a few ways to look at it. One way is to say that if you went to the trampoline park every Saturday for two hours, you would expect an injury about once every nine years and a serious injury about once every 90 years. The authors of the paper also very helpfully put these numbers in context with other sports. The risks are estimated to be only about 5% as high as the rates estimated for Australian children playing football. Trampoline injury rates are comparable to injury rates from tennis playing.
If you do go to the trampoline park, the graph below shows the injury rate by area. Beware the foam pit and the high-performance areas! Slam-dunking, though, seems fine.
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Is that graph labeled correctly? Should it be injury rate per 1000 jumper hours? Or is this supposed to show the rate relative to the average injury rate? Thanks!
Yeah, as is I’m reading it as saying that on average half of people get injured sitting in the non-active area for an hour??