I am very surprised that automated systems like this aren’t illegal. If Apple wants to start a service like this, they should be required to install an intermediary to properly handle the calls instead of just wasting the time of emergency operators and responders and endangering people’s lives by tying up the system. I believe that’s how OnStar worked/works. As it is now, they’re just outsourcing implementations of the feature to emergency services.
I absolutely hate the world where our government sits around and waits for Apple to “fix” this, whatever that means, instead of actively prosecuting them to force this feature off and penalize them.
A quick web search shows that several people have been charged and jailed over spamming 911. Apple should be too.
As a thought experiment, say you were a person on a ski slope watching people ski and immediately calling 911 when a fall occurred. Would that stand? No. So why should Apple get away with it just because they’ve automated it and outsourced it to phones and scaled it geographically?
Interestingly, this seems to be one of the ways their satellite based emergency services system works - using a relay station to receive messages from phones. This would suggest they already have infrastructure they could use for these features.
I believe there is established precedent in some countries that you can't connect alarm auto dialers straight to the emergency phone number (precisely because of false call-outs), and therefore need to go through an alarm monitoring company. Apple seems to be doing a direct link to emergency services here, in a world where circuit switched telco precedents seem to be missed in the packet switched world.
My guess is they think they can win in the court of public opinion because it's for "people like you" using a phone that you have, rather than something for "other people".
It would be interesting to see how Apple could be forced to implement proper quality assurance and scenario-based negative test validation of their products before they are allowed to do these kinds of things.
I'm unfamiliar with how Apple's relay works, but Garmin's relay (IERCC) doesn't do much screening. It wouldn't have screened out these calls, as an activation by someone who doesn't reply to texts is treated as a very badly injured person who isn't capable of communication, forwarded directly to the appropriate authorities, and in most cases in the US if conditions permit those authorities will dispatch a rapid response.
There's a good reason for this. In TFA, for example, the authorities are merely asking Apple to properly calibrate the algorithm to skiing. They like the general concept, and have examples of it helping.
One thing I find interesting is that in this kind of thread there are lots of people who don't work in backcountry search and rescue condemning this sort of technology on behalf of search and rescue. I don't have relevant experience, but plenty of people I listen to who do support this kind of technology. They want to get more help to inexperienced people faster because their top priority is helping people and not punishing potential moral failings.
Do any of the Garmin devices self activate? You can configure mine to automatically drop pins on the map every few minutes/hours but it won't signal for an emergency unless you hit the button and confirm on the prompt. The button is behind a rubber stopper to prevent accidental activation, without being completely careless you can't kick it off by accident.
> My guess is they think they can win in the court of public opinion because it's for "people like you" using a phone that you have, rather than something for "other people".
This stuff just really upsets me because, if it happens like that, it just shows the corporate capture of the U.S. and Apple's nearly limitless market power.
> It would be interesting to see how Apple could be forced to implement proper quality assurance and scenario-based negative test validation of their products before they are allowed to do these kinds of things.
It seems to me that the bar should be incredibly high, which would mean that it's basically impossible to hook up automated systems to the emergency services line. Because I don't see a way that they could rule out false positives, especially when they're actively pushing their Apple Watch to the active and extreme sports crowds.
Apple shouldn’t be using emergency services as worker bees to finish an incomplete feature that results in false positives more often than not.
The article directly mentions that none of the calls have been actual emergencies and that it is absolutely tying up resources.
The feature is fine in spirit, and I am sure it has helped in some situations. But I don’t like Apple failing fast. It’s going to end up costing a life because responders respond unenthusiastically to an automated call or the automated calls tying up resources preventing proper response to a real emergency.
Automation that is not accurate is a real problem. Humans will quickly calibrate to it being wrong most of the time. This has occurred time and time again.
> an incomplete feature that results in false positives more often than not.
It doesn't.
> The article directly mentions that none of the calls have been actual emergencies and that it is absolutely tying up resources.
None of the calls in this small town in the middle of multiple skiing resorts. The feature works pretty well in general and has saved multiple lives. It just unfortunately produces an increased number of false alarms for an activity (skiing) that is done very geographically concentrated, and on top of that impedes responses to confirmation calls (because the phones are kept in the pockets of thick clothes).
> Automation that is not accurate is a real problem. Humans will quickly calibrate to it being wrong most of the time. This has occurred time and time again.
Even if they did that, they would do it only in skiing towns, leaving the feature useful elsewhere.
> It just unfortunately produces an increased number of false alarms for an activity (skiing) that is done very geographically concentrated
Skiing isn't the only industry affected by this. I'm involved in the auto racing industry. At a recent conference, there was some intense discussion about false alarms resulting in emergency services showing up at the track and who's responsible for paying for it.
Absolutely every article I have seen on this topic has the emergency services people stress that the last thing they want is for people to be afraid of calling them. Because they already get cases where people "don't want to be a bother" and end up dead from a heart attack or permanently disabled from a stroke.
They most definitely do not want to eliminate false positives entirely.
> False calls are a nuisance and inappropriately waste resources.
But as I wrote: trying to eliminate them completely would be far worse. The only real waste are false calls that are done deliberately.
Now this case with the Apple devices is a very unusual one that really needs to have its specific circumstances taken into account. And those specific circumstances are that it does not, in general produce a lot of false positives. But for a specific activity it does, and unfortunately that activity is geographically concentrated so that those false positives are also concentrated. That should be addressed, but it absolutely does not mean the feature does more bad than good overall.
What happens when they can only respond to N calls at a time, but have 2N routinely coming in, 2N-1 of which are false positives? They can’t respond to them all. At some point systems like this will unwittingly DOS the 911/first responder situation.
Yes, of course the false positives can become so frequent that it's not tolerable. But that absolutely does not mean that allowing none at all is a sensible goal, because that invariably means more false negatives.
And the article does not sound like the false positives are at the intolerable level, in the opinion of the people actually affected.
But your original comment doesn’t acknowledge the limits on ability to respond. Yes of course in the abstract they would rather respond to all false alarms so as to not miss true alarms, but there’s always a limit. This is why fire departments charge for false alarms. When I worked at my university after graduating, we had a string of false alarms from the data center, and at some point the city allegedly started charging for them. I see no reason not to bill Apple if a jurisdiction has a similar policy already in place.
> But your original comment doesn’t acknowledge the limits on ability to respond.
It also doesn't say that false positives are irrelevant, just that eliminating them should not be the highest priority.
Because the comment I was replying to stated that "the bar should be incredibly high, which would mean that it's basically impossible to hook up automated systems to the emergency services line."
Governments didn't move fast enough to block Uber and other illegal taxi services, partially because these well-funded startups had the means to tie things up in courts for months, while continuing to operate.
As a thought experiment, if someone saw a skiing accident and called 911 then that person would not get in to any sort of trouble if the person who crashed was basically OK.
If I was in a skiing accident I would prefer to live in a world where people erred on the side of calling emergency services when they assumed there was an emergency.
What exactly is the the problem with only dozens of false positives?
I can forgive if once in a blue moon a person mistakes what turns out to be a minor mishap for a severe incident. But when a computer running an inacurate algorithm starts spamming the system, that's unacceptable. If it was a person initiating all those false alarms we would similarly make them stop crying wolf.
It's a lot more than dozens. 71 false alarms in the course of a weekend is a significant strain when you've only got two 911 operators. And that's just one county.
I have called 911 as a bystander before, usually noticing something on the road or some other situation when driving on the highway. Although I am not afraid to call 911 to notify them, before calling, I think thoroughly about doing so and evaluate the situation appropriately. The operators also ask questions, like is the object on the road, was there anyone in the car in the ditch, they’ve already been notified, etc. Why does Apple get to play by different rules and operate more recklessly?
From the article, none of the automated calls were an emergency situation. Humans don’t react well to false positives, and over time, those calls will be handled with much less priority or attention.
In the particular situation of skiing, they have their own patrols. I’m not aware of endemic situations where people are injured but not discovered or helped.
My issue is that Apple is using emergency services as the last mile implementation rather than handling it themselves.
> What exactly is the the problem with only dozens of false positives?
Significantly stricter restrictions for all visitors, regardless of skill level would be one.
Like when people say "Back in my day, you didn't need a safety warning on a hot cup of coffee", we may need to do the same once the local 911 dispatch centre starts recording higher numbers of calls.
Maybe apple could give users the option to disable this feature while skiing? Or even create ski mode that behaves differently. (I honestly can’t think of the perimeters but I’m sure apple has software engineers who are more clever by half)
I know this sort of user first mentality is becoming more and more alien to the Apple ideology, but there’s a reason we keep coming back to it.
The user knows what they want and if you think you know better you better be damn sure.
The thought process of apple is that every saved person is worth whatever cost it might have especially if you as a company don't get to carry it. And the topic is fairly hard to discuss given that justification. You only need one single case where the feature was helpful to win the argument.
This is exactly the point. Tying up phone dispatchers time is annoying and marginal. Sending limited search and rescue teams off on wild goose chases could have fatal consequences.
The journalist in question did not do any research towards how large of an effect this is. That quote does nothing but service the claim that this is a “problem” worth discussing, and more importantly, a “problem” worth sharing on commercial social media…
Grand County Sheriff Brett Schroetlin called the calls are “problematic and time-consuming,” but said they have not impacted dispatch operations.
Journalists are trained at extracting provocative statements that are conspicuously apt for misinterpretation. The above quote is a perfect example. The original conversation could be 3 minutes about how this is a nothingburger but then the Sheriff being badgered into conceding that in isolation the calls are problematic and time-consuming…
What? How is talking to the dispatchers inundated by false alarms failing to do research? That’s literally the people who would know.
The biggest danger of false alarm is alert fatigue. If your false to real ratio is ten to one you’ve seriously messed up. This sounds like exactly the case where false alarms are causing real harm to people in need.
Your stance shows a serious misunderstanding of incident response.
What’s the trade-off though? If an Apple Watch sends an emergency call every time a skier or snowboarder falls, that’s several calls per day. I would think that would be too much and we should hold Apple liable for that level of false alerts.
It’s an extreme example, but I want to make the argument that there is a balance to consider.
Why not hold the apple user responsible if anyone? Fall alert is an optional feature (that I think might be opt-in during setup). Once it detects a fall, you have a bit of time to respond to the watch to tell you are fine. Although this would obviously be difficult when you are fully bundled up.
But the best place to start would probably be the law enforcement officers working with the nearby ski resorts to educate their patrons about the apple watch feature with signage.
Is it? I upgraded to a Watch 8 recently and it seems to be off by default (it could be that I opted out a million years ago on my old watch and it carried over).
Though I distinctly remember being asked about it when setting up my mom’s watch a few years ago so maybe it’s based on age?
It was an opt in thing on my watch as well. But it looks like it is on by default on the new iphone 14. Personally I think it should be opt-in during setup.
Everyone who's saying this has clearly never had a job that requires an on call rotation. At a certain point, you start treating these things as non-emergencies. Doesn't matter how much you initially care or want to do a good job, you can't respond to everything.
My pixel 4a5g running LineageOS did it on me one day from pressing the on/off button a few times in rapid succession. I had no idea it would do that. I was just in the final stages of trying to get any reaction out of it because the screen was not coming on. Turns out the phone was still running and working but the screen had died.
I don't think any of these too-automatic and non-apparent things are a good idea. I had no intention to call 911, and I had not intentionally configured that action. I'm just glad the speaker and mic still worked and I was able to hear the operator and respond to them.
I don't even see how this one even helps anyone even in theory. Is it even any faster than dialing 911? If I were in an emergency, would I remember some weird trick like that at a time like that? Are they thinking that people in duress will rapidly and repeatedly squeez their phone naturally and so it dials when needed without you consciouly needing to?
I guess maybe the theory is that in any kind of car or bike crash, or even ordinary fall or violence, there is a good chance the violence will have damaged the phone's most fragile part, but just like in my case the phone still worked. So it's actually somewhat likely to be a valuable option to have some way to dial 911 witbout a working screen. Ok maybe I guess.
It helps you when you need to call 911 quickly but maybe can't talk freely or something dangerous will happen to you (E.g. domestic violence, Assault, etc).
The Pixel will transmit your location and also inform 5 emergency contacts, start a camera stream etc (depending on what you configured).
It's also not enabled by default so you must have enabled it
It's not covert in any way. The phone emits a siren sound at full volume for a few seconds before calling and the call comes up in handsfree/speaker mode.
I had no idea it had dialed anything until I happened to hear the operator. It wasn't even on speakerpbone but normal phone mode, so it was quiet, but luckily I was in a quiet room at thd time.
The speaker was functional. Other normal sounds were happening. It did vibrate, but it does that for several ordinary events, including reboot which I was half expecting, and so was not alarming.
Perhaps the audibility is configurable, placing this right back into "tool under the users control", and covert if the user wants it to be.
I just checked the settings again. Indeed there is a "Play alarm sound" setting if you scroll down. I guess it was enabled by default in my case (good, since otherwise I might not know that my phone made the call from my backpack).
Slightly off topic, but I did not even notice before the Emergency SOS settings screen has anything below the break. This UI design is just terrible. There is absolutely nothing hinting that you can scroll down:
(Looking at the screenshot now, you can just about see that alarm sound setting below the slightly transparent bottom row. That's just about impossible to see on the real phone, plus the row has the usual Android set of buttons on top, obscuring the text even further).
I don't remember where but I've seen examples of that "no clues to scroll down" or "no clues this word is clickable" etc a few different places. It's like we're forgetting everything we've spent hundreds of years learning. (interfaces in general, from way before computers)
I hate when devices do stuff i don't tell them to do. All it does is create more work because i have to cancel whatever dumb program just got launched without my consent. In stone scenarios it can even be a security liability (see autoplay).
My Pixel 3 had a hardware failure where the power button didn’t fully spring back. As a result, it was read as the button being pressed repeatedly, over and over. Most of the time, it was caught in a reboot cycle. If it made it past the reboot cycle, that same feature meant that it tried to call 911, repeatedly.
Not sure about LineageOS, but Apple's crash and fall detection is fully automatic – it sounds a warning and gives you a chance to cancel, but if you don't, it calls 911 without any interaction. Which would be helpful if you're unable to reach your devices, unconscious, etc.
...and 911 and the highly-trained & -equipped responders have all the extra resources and patience needed to handle and respond to all the automated false alarms. And governments don't quickly get sick of the expense and create "ignore automated cries of 'wolf'" policies.
A few days ago I had a similar experience. My Nokia phone running Android 13 called emergency services (112 in Europe) while I was carrying it in my backpack. I can only guess that some other thing was randomly pressing against the power button.
I was not aware this feature exists and certainly did not turn it on myself. It must have been turned on by default.
I was shocked because the phone suddenly started emitting a loud siren sound and then the operator came on speaker asking what the emergency is. All while I was still trying to figure out what the hell is even happening.
I managed to explain that there was no emergency and that my phone apparently made the call automatically. The operator was understanding and I was thinking that it probably wasn't the first call like that they received.
That’s lousy. Next time an attacker hears you call 911 (112), they’ll snatch your phone from your hands and tell the operator I’m sorry it just called by mistake. Oh don’t worry we’ll close the case now.
I had this happen with my iPhone while trying to fit it into a case for the bike: the case did press against the buttons because it was difficult to fit... I didn't know about this feature. I disabled it after that.
I think it is inappropriate to have such hidden features: while we tech people mostly understand the thing, I bet most people won't even get that it is a hidden feature and would think it is a bug. No one will remember to use it during a real emergency anyway.
Same device and set up. My children have gotten ahold of my phone when I wasn't looking and triggered it twice now. I have a box that I keep my phone in now, on top of the refrigerator. I used to leave it face down on the counter top but they eventually got tall enough or clever enough to get it.
I was a passenger in a car crash last year. I don’t remember where my phone ended up, but after the crash sent everything flying, I saw someone else’s phone in front of me and immediately activated the emergency 911 mode.
The phone I had picked up was also now cracked. I believe in this case it still ended up working, but if the digitizer was more damaged the only possible way to call 911 would be the gesture.
> I don't even see how this one even helps anyone even in theory. Is it even any faster than dialing 911?
How do you dial if you can't see your phone? One of the things I miss about my old landline phone is that I could dial it entirely by feel. In any kind of accident or medical condition that makes me lose my vision I would not be able to dial a smartphone on-screen keyboard (or even pull up the phone app in the first place).
I realized this a few years ago when I suddenly had a black spot appear in one eye. The black spot expanded over the course of a few seconds until I could no longer see anything in that eye. Aside from one eye no longer working, I felt fine. As I was trying to decide if this was a "call 911" thing or a "drive to the emergency room" thing the black started contracting and went away. I felt find and did a few cognitive tests and coordination tests and passed so I decided to wait a bit and see if this was a one time thing. A month later it happened again, but since I was less surprised by it I was able to do some experiments and found that if I looked at a bright light I did see the black lighten and there was a particular spot off to the side where I could actually see (barely) the bright light. After that second incidence I did go to the doctor...and he found nothing. An MRI also showed nothing. So, still no idea what the hell it was, but it has not come back.
But it definitely made my realize it would be very useful to be able to summon help without having to see.
> If I were in an emergency, would I remember some weird trick like that at a time like that? Are they thinking that people in duress will rapidly and repeatedly squeez their phone naturally and so it dials when needed without you consciouly needing to?
I definitely remember at some point during setting up my iPhone (or maybe when I upgrade to the first OS that supported emergency calling?) there was a dialog that explained it and told me how to enable/disable it.
On my iPhone (iPhone X...I think there is some variation among different models) the settings (which are all on/off) are
• "Call with Hold" where if you hold the side button and a volume for a few seconds you get the emergency screen. If you continue to hold you get an alert sound and a countdown to calling 911. The emergency screen also has a slider for calling 911 and a slider to view your medical ID and a slider to power down the phone.
• "Call with 5 Presses". Press the side button 5 times to bring up the emergency screen, and sound the alarm and start the countdown to calling 911.
• "Countdown Sound". Turns the alert sound during the 911 countdown on or off.
BTW, when you dismiss the emergency screen the phone locks and disables Face ID until you enter your passcode. If you have to hand you phone to someone such as law enforcement, it is pretty easy when reaching into your pocket to get it to trigger "Call with Hold" if you have it enabled. Hold until you get haptic feedback, and then release before the 911 countdown starts so that you won't get an alarm. Then press the side button again to exit the emergency screen.
I’m an avid snowboarder and mountain biker and live in a Colorado ski town. I had called detection and crash detection enabled on my phone and watch since it came out.
I was thrilled when I took a bad spill over the bars of my mountain bike at 30mph downhill and my phone offered to call 911.
I was dismayed when I started snowboarding this season and without falling my watch texted my emergency contacts and called 911 repeatedly on my first runs of the season.
I’ve now disabled it as my older mother doesn’t need another reason to be scared of her son doing extreme sports regularly.
Now I lost the extra safety the feature provided simply because it was incapable of understanding snowboarding behavior.
Every year, I spend one week as ski/snowboard instructor with "town" teenagers for the first time on a board. 3 years ago, I had to ban these automatic alerts and ask the kids to disable them because of the false alerts. Last year was ok.
It looks like I will have to do it again this year.
As an instructor, it is really bad wenn you see the rescue team coming to you for nothing, knowing that it diverts resources for real cases.
Update: you never ever need such piece of shitty automated system on a normal ski slope. Outside of the slopes you need an Arva.
My Apple Watch had called 911 or “Emergency SOS” at least twice. I don’t even think it is fall detection but the button getting held down when I’m paddling or duck diving sometimes. What sucks is that when you’re wet you can’t easily cancel the call, let alone understand anything being said on the speaker. Even after taking it out of water mode, if you’re fully in the water it’s a problem.
Luckily after the last situation I opened up the app and disabled all Emergency SOS features so hopefully it does not happen again. Also, hopefully I never actually need it
This reminds me when I was younger my family would bring walkie talkies to talk to each other when skiing. But they didn't work well or at all if you were on different mountains, in a valley, etc. It's a wonder we were able to not get lost lol
I thought that there was some sort of natural disaster in the town, resulting in POTS phones and normal cell service being out, but some Apple feature (meshing perhaps) enabling the automated alerts to get through.
The “crash detection” and “fall detection” features on the Apple iPhone 14 and watches automatically call 911 when the devices detect a sudden stop that, in concept, means the user has been involved in a car crash.
I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason.
“We are communicating with Apple to get them to pay more attention to this but it feels like we are trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub.”
An easy way to get them to pay attention might be to just loudly announce the intention to, and then start ignoring, automated calls from them, or at least deprioritise them in favour of human calls. The equivalent of nullrouting DDoS traffic.
"We did have a conversation with Apple about the crash detection this fall and they told us they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix they were hoping to have out in the first quarter of 2023"
As did some other people.
"His dispatch supervisor has contacted Apple and received a response that the company is aware of the conflict between skiers and the crash detection technology and are working on a fix, Schroetlin said."
It happened to me last week when I tossed my coat forgetting the phone was in the pocket. I was very confused when I came back 30s later and dispatch was on the speakerphone asking what the emergency was
Since a false positive generally causes much less harm than missing a true positive making no false positives a requirement is generally a terrible idea.
As I mentioned in another post, Apple shouldn’t be farming out the determination to emergency services. They can provide an intermediary to determine the severity. The situation is such that a phone or watch does not have enough information to properly evaluate a situation as an emergency or not.
I drop my phone a lot, but having a glass screen protector, I believe, adds the extra reinforcement needed to disapate the shock and prevents my screen from cracking.
It's a fundamentally stupid idea, the sensors in the watch are woefully insufficient to detect such an event with any reasonable amount of precision. Bumping your watch into a tree would generate massive G forces, hitting your head while your arms are flailing would barely register.
At minimum, it would require biosensors that detect the owner is still wearing the watch yet his life signs are significantly perturbed from the norm: irregular heart beat and oxygen saturation, hypothermia, AI-informed sound interpretation for things like gasping for air etc.
It is not as dumb as just looking for spikes in acceleration, but specific patterns and integrating acceleration to get position and velocity history in order to match situations that look like car crashes. Obviously the real world is demonstrating some bugs with bad matches that didn’t get found in testing, but this isn’t surprising or some big failure. Unfortunate it is bothering emergency workers, but is it actually impacting emergency services?
Mine only goes off when I fall.. so I do think they know what they are doing. My mother is 72 and lives alone, I plan to get her an apple watch specifically to detect falls as I have been very impressed with its ability to detect them.
> “Apple has validated sensor and algorithm performance using extensive real world and simulated car crashes, allowing the feature to detect as many severe crashes as possible, while minimizing false positives”
Ah yes, the tried and true method of minimizing false positives: test on true positives.
I wish there was some way to make apple responsible for the costs this incurs. I hate the idea that they can sell more phones based on a feature that effectively DDOSes emergency services, with the cost being beared entirely by the public.
As a business owner, I receive random ass invoices all the time. I ignore them and have an attorney for the cheeky ones who send them to collections or small claims hoping I won’t show up. My wife has dual sim with US + NL phone numbers. Her iPhone will not let her choose which one to call from when tapping a phone number on a webpage, so whenever she does this, depending on which country we are in, can cost a few dollars/euros per minute.
I was joking that we should send Apple an invoice for the faulty feature. Maybe they will pay it, and if they don’t, we can take them to small claims court. I’m quite familiar with the process now. Lol.
I actually saw a case where some guy took Apple to small-claims court because they wouldn't service his iphone unless he changed the password, and he contended that this is a violation of his contract with Apple-care. They kept sending the manager of the local apple-store to represent them despite local laws requiring them to send either a lawyer or the CEO. Eventually after several court dates and appeals they're forced to grant him an exception to their policy and also he got Apple's income garnished for $185 to cover his court fees.
I have a hard time believing that story, mostly for all the reasons the other commenters listed, but also because I just don't see Apple sending a store manager to represent them in court. In my time there, even the smallest legal threat (e.g. "if you don't fix my X for free, I'm going to sue you") was an instant conversation ending statement. The only valid response for any of us employees after that was "Thank you but we can no longer help you, here is the number for the legal department". Given that, I just can't actually see them sending a store manager, even to a small claims thing. If they didn't actually care, they wouldn't have sent anyone at all and taken the default judgment (since small claims are definitionally, small) and if they did care, they would have sent someone who can actually represent the company legally.
I fully agree. Corporations get away with stuff all the time because of the scale of the mistakes, when those are the times they should be punished the most.
I set mine off in a ski “crash”, where I turned uphill very quickly and apparently that was high enough g force - oddly, I had already crashed hard enough to bruise my ribs earlier but that did not set off the detection.
It goes without saying, I hope, that if you do accidentally call the emergency services you should stay on the phone until you speak to someone and explain the situation.
No-one will shout at you for it. You're not in any trouble.
Just for fuck's sake don't hang up the call, because then we have to send everyone to your phone's reported position just in case there *is* a problem.
A long time ago, I wrote a fall detector application for Android which could be configured to send a Tweet (Twitter was fresh and new then), send an SMS to a caretaker number, make alerts, etc.
This really is important technology, particularly for the elderly and infirm.
When the app started to get used, it was very popular.
The reason is - we configured it to be used with a caretaker - i.e. another human that would be alerted if there were a fall. This use-case was immediately compatible with existing structures in the fall-detector market; i.e. letting grandma out into the yard for a bit of alone time while I put the kettle on...
I don't know if Apple have a way for the user to inform a caretaker, but if they do I can only assume its a nuisance to set up.
Devices should offer a quick way too disable the feature for a limited amount of time, so that people don't forget to turn it back on. Like it's possible with Do Not Disturb features. Perhaps that could be called Action Mode.
Apple Watch OS 9 replaced power off with emergency call. Now power off is a small button at top right instead of slide at the bottom. I did call 911 once instead of powering off watch.
It seems this problem could be largely mitigated by incorporating some kind of timestamp. "This person hasn't moved in the last minute" isn't such a big deal. "This person hasn't moved in 10 minutes" is probably cause for alarm
I didn’t exactly test it, but I believe on the Apple Watch, an emergency call will be only activated after an explicit announcement was not interrupted. Why Apple changed that in the iPhone 14 is a riddle for me.
As anyone who has worked in ML knows, this feature will require some tuning. Tuning that Apple will do. I’m not sure this minor issue warrants rounding up the firing squad to execute the teams that built it.
Why is that not a problem with Android phones? Does Google have more accurate crash detection? Or is it just because much less Android phones with crash detection (such as the Pixel phones) are in use?
> surprised instead by an actually pretty cool feature TM from Apple.
In what world is generating false positives spamming 911 and potentially displacing actual emergencies a "pretty cool feature"??? This "feature" is doing more harm than good in Summit County, it's trash:
“We are not in the practice of disregarding calls,” said Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 Center. “These calls involve a tremendous amount of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrollers. And I don’t think we’ve ever had an actual emergency event.”
> The technology has been heralded for saving lives
The problems faced by emergency ski services are niche. If this technology doesn't give false positives outside of that niche I'd say it's pretty worth it. And fixing it for that niche is probably not that hard.
In general I'd say spend more resources if it meant saving more lives; inverse need not apply?
I think OP was being sarcastic. I think that because they added TM (for trademark) after "Feature", which I take to mean sarcasm is being expressed in the sentence.
All that to say, myself (and likely OP) agree with your thoughts.
In a world where it's probably also saving a lot of lives. Ambulance sirens probably cause a couple extra accidents as drivers try to get out of the way. Doesn't mean we should stop trying; it means we should keep trying to improve.
It's important to note how 911 calls "fail": if you don't answer, emergency services assume the worst and respond as such.
So that's dozens of events where they have to send first responders out to see if there's a serious injury/fatality on the mountain because it could be nothing or you could have collided with a tree or fallen off a cliff.
The problem seems to be that Apple under-thought this feature. They made it one-size-fits-all instead of context sensitive. For example, maybe when it detects you're near a ski resort it asks you to switch into a skiing-friendly mode for the rest of the day. Same for amusement parks and other common pastimes that involve rapid deceleration events.
Yes, dozens. 71 in one weekend is a huge number for one small department!
Just because this number sounded low to you as quoted in the headline doesn't mean it's not a big expensive problem for them. They can't ignore 911 calls.
And unless this ski town is home to an unusual number of clumsy iphone users, this pattern is likely happening wherever Apple has rolled out automated 911 calling in regions with outdoor active sports.
I honestly dont know, I am not an Apple support person. As we have learnt, its only a few steps from "this is useful" to "we have just mandated this because it is so useful and people are too stupid to realize how cool this is!" Trust me, in a few years, automated emergency calls will be mandatory, downvoting the messenger doesn't help either folks.
I absolutely hate the world where our government sits around and waits for Apple to “fix” this, whatever that means, instead of actively prosecuting them to force this feature off and penalize them.
A quick web search shows that several people have been charged and jailed over spamming 911. Apple should be too.
As a thought experiment, say you were a person on a ski slope watching people ski and immediately calling 911 when a fall occurred. Would that stand? No. So why should Apple get away with it just because they’ve automated it and outsourced it to phones and scaled it geographically?