Countless False Alarms: New iPhone Feature Causes Frustration

With a new iPhone and a new iOS operating system, Apple usually releases many new features at once. This also applies to the new iPhone 14 and the new Apple Watch models. An introduced accident detection system aims to recognize accidents of users and then make an emergency call. This feature is for car accidents.

If the device moves at high speed and then stops abruptly, it suspects an accident. The iPhone or Apple Watch users will then see a message on their smartphone that there is a suspected accident. If the users do not react to this, an emergency call is automatically made by the device after a short time.

But as it has now been shown, the function also reacts in other situations and suspects an accident, when no accident actually happened.

iPhone made emergency calls to skiers

Rescue workers from the US state of Colorado are now complaining about a large number of false alarms, reports “The Colorado Sun”. Last weekend, 71 emergency calls came in from Apple devices. These, in most cases, were likely from ski resorts and stopped in the event of a fall. There was no real emergency in these distress calls.

Yet the wrong emergency calls mean a lot of work for the rescue teams and require a lot of resources. First the skiers are called. However, if they do not respond to the call of the rescue services, a special ski patrol task force is sent.

When emergency calls come in to the main office, they are processed in the order they came in. A fake automatic call can delay the response to a real emergency.

Incorrectly recognized emergency calls already recognized as a problem

Some time ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on emergency calls that turned out to be false. In this case, the incident detection of the Apple devices responded while riding the roller coaster.

Apple is now aware of the problem and the company is said to be working on a solution.