The new SOS satellite technology in Apple devices is designed to help people in need when they can no longer do it themselves. The “Crash Detection” and “Fall Detection” features on all new Apple devices automatically activate the emergency call if the devices detect a sudden stop. For the device, this means that the owner is involved in a serious accident. A big advantage for users in the mountains outside the mobile network.
However, mobile phones and watches are often wrong. They also activate the emergency call in the roller coaster or in an innocent skiing accident. This in turn has a negative impact on the resorts’ emergency centers, which waste their resources on unnecessary emergency calls.
For example, the 911 center in Summit County, Colorado, which is responsible for the region’s four ski resorts, received 71 automatic emergency calls from skiers’ iPhones and Apple watches last weekend alone, according to The Colorado Sun. However, none of these cases were an emergency.
“It’s a Huge Burden”
“It’s not our style to ignore calls,” Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 emergency center, told the newspaper. “However, these calls require a lot of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrols.” Figuring out which alarms are real and which are not is a huge burden.
Brett Loeb, head of the emergency center, assures that they try to return every call. However, a callback request often goes unanswered because, for example, the skier’s phone is deep in his pocket. If the skier does not respond to a callback request, a special officer contacts the skiers to verify the location of the automated call. However, all iPhone alarms triggered in the past month were false alarms. “We’re definitely diverting critical resources from people who need them to a feature on a phone,” says Dummer.
“People need to understand their phones better”
As early as the fall of 2022, head office manager Loeb contacted Apple to point out the problem. “They told us they are aware of the issue and are working on a fix that they hope to release in the first quarter of 2023,” says Loeb. However, the request does not fall into open ears. It feels “like we’re trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub”.
That is why interim director Dummer hopes that in the future more users – especially skiers – will get better control of the fall detection function on their mobile phone. “People need to better understand their phones and know that they have some level of responsibility as owners of phones with these features.” (Hi)