This is starting to pop up in additional scenarios now as Apple is forced to figure out how to compensate for false alerts coming from its Crash Detection feature. The feature is built into the latest iPhone (14) and Apple Watch models and is designed to help users by automatically alerting authorities if the device thinks the user has been involved in a vehicle crash. Potentially saving lives, making for a great security blanket.
However, it isn’t quite perfect as users have been triggering plenty of false alerts through various activities. Activities like riding roller coasters, which has been a widespread issue in certain cities with popular theme parks. Where local emergency services have been weeding through a number of false alerts to determine who really is or isn’t in danger.
Now that snow is starting to fall in various cities, users are now running into false alerts caused by going down while skiing. Although these tumbles can indeed result in an emergency situation, in most cases, a tumble is something that happens all the time and the user is usually back on their skis and continuing the path in no time. Meanwhile, the phone thinks they might have been in an accident, triggering an alert to emergency services.
Although this is a new feature and simply needs to be tweaked over time to compensate for these false alerts/positives, it still puts strain on emergency services. It sounds like it should have gone through plenty of real-world scenarios before it was ever released to the public. Some of these scenarios seem pretty positive and could have potentially been avoided.
Then again, how do you differentiate between a roller coaster, a tumble while skiing, and a car crash? Beyond factoring GPS deeply into the mix, I couldn’t say myself. If Apple can’t figure it out fast, it may face a lot of pressure from emergency services to disable the feature until it can.
That seems to not be the case just yet though as emergency services haven’t quite taken offense. Even if only one out of twenty calls is a legit alert and could be a life saved, it is making some kind of a valuable difference. Apple also has developers that are a lot smarter than I am. So there may be certain effective variables I’m not even considering that could go into the enhancement of the feature.
It really is a great idea in general. Like having a fall-alert system that spans past elderly patients to everyone else in the world (not so much “like” as “it is”). At least, those who own an iPhone. I’m sure other manufacturers will eventually consider adding something similar to their devices (aka, Android phones/watches).
