[SoftTalker]

I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.

[darkwater]

Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life.

Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it.

Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.

[SoftTalker]

My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.

[KerrAvon]

Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies.

Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959

[bigiain]

Of course, the seconds that matter might be someone else's medical emergency, which your iPhone or Apple Watch is slowing down with false positives.

From https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/03/iphone-crash-detection-critic...

“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.

[darkwater]

Yep, this is the other side of the coin for sure. There should probably be some basic training around these features; there will still be many (careless) people that just completely ignore the "are you OK?" question the watch/phone is asking them but maybe the situation would improve.

[PaulHoule]

To be fair this kind of thing is emotionally manipulative.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has done a lot as a private organization to raise standards for automotive safety but the statistics they publish that show that larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles are frequently wrongly interpreted -- in many of the cases where the large vehicle does better it's not that you die in the smaller vehicle but instead get a broken bone. Once something is seen as "life or death" some people will think they have no choice but to spend another $50,000, spew another 20 tons of carbon pollution, etc.

[loloquwowndueo]

> larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles

Just pointing this out. It’s easy to see what you actually meant :)

[adrianN]

Depending on your luck a broken bone can permanently lower your quality of life