There are eight causes of selfie-related deaths, according to a new study from students and researchers based in the US and India: height, water, height and water combined, train, weapons, vehicles, electricity, and "animal" (i.e., this).
The study isn't peer-reviewed and has some grammar mistakes, but the methodology is thorough. The researchers counted up all the articles about selfie-related deaths written in English since March 2014, then categorized them according to cause of death.
India has far more than any other country, they found, and three-quarters of those who die because they took a selfie are men.
The paper, titled "Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and Preventing Selfie Deaths," is tragicomic. We learn that young couples in India find it romantic to take selfies on train tracks. This has resulted in 15 deaths. We also learn that so many killfies involve both height and water that the deaths caused by the combination of both were categorized separately, and that electricity caused five killfie deaths in four separate incidents.
The study authors hope to use the data to "build a technology that can help users identify if a particular location is dangerous for taking selfies, and also provide information about casualties that have happened there in the past."
The big takeaway is that avoiding dying while taking a selfie is not so different from avoiding dying at any other time. Stay safe out there.
