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Unnecessarily triggered emergency calls from iPhones are a major burden for emergency call centers. The picture shows the Baselland cantonal police headquarters.
The new SOS satellite technology in Apple devices is designed to help people in need when they are no longer able to do so themselves. The “Crash Detection” and “Fall Detection” functions on all new Apple devices automatically activate the emergency call if the devices detect a sudden standstill. For the device, this means its owner is involved in a serious accident. A big advantage for users in the mountains outside of the mobile network.
However, cell phones and watches are often wrong. They also trigger the emergency call on the roller coaster or in the event of a harmless skiing accident. This in turn has a negative impact on the emergency call centers of the ski resorts, whose resources are wasted on unnecessary emergency calls.
For example, the 911 center in Summit County, Colorado, which is responsible for the region’s four ski areas, received 71 automatic emergency calls from skiers’ iPhones and Apple watches last weekend alone, according to The Colorado Sun. However, none of these cases was an emergency.
“It’s a huge burden”
“It’s not our style to ignore calls,” Trina Dummer, the interim director of Summit County’s 911 dispatcher, told the newspaper. “However, these calls require a lot of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrols.” Sorting out which alarms are real and which are not is a huge burden.
Brett Loeb, head of the emergency call center, assures that they try to call back every call. However, a call back often goes unanswered because the skier’s phone is buried deep in a pocket, for example. If the skier does not respond to a call back, a special operations officer contacts the skiers to verify the location of the automated call. However, all triggered iPhone alarms in the last month were false alarms. “We’re diverting absolutely critical resources away from people who need them to a feature on a phone,” Dummer says.
«People need to understand their phones better»
As early as autumn 2022, head office manager Loeb contacted Apple to point out the problem. “They told us that they are aware of the problem and are working on a solution that they hope to be able to release in the first quarter of 2023,” says Loeb. However, the request does not fall on open ears. It feels “as if we were trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub”.
That’s why interim director Dummer hopes that more users – especially skiers – will have better control of the fall detection function on their cell phones in the future. “People need to understand their phones better and know that they have a certain level of responsibility as owners of phones with these features.” (hey)