Over the years, Apple Watch has been improved in such a way to help its users be protected from health ailments or even any emergency situations. There has been so many stories where an Apple watch has saved people from death. One of those stories is like this one below.
In this article we will see in detail about how fall detection works and how can you disable or enable it in your Apple Watch. In addition to that we will show you how you can set up Emergency Contacts and why its important.
What is Fall Detection?
Fall Detection is a feature that is added to Apple Watch that identifies when the person who is wearing the watch falls down for any number of reasons especially due to any health problems. Detecting the falls helps the device to ask for emergency help so that in case of a serious health issue, they would need the help they need.
See Also: How to set Apple Watch Move Goals?
The Fall detection works only on certain devices. If you have Apple Watch Series 4 or Apple Watch SE, then the fall Detection feature is available and can help you get in touch with emergency services.
How does Fall Detection work in Apple Watch?
The moment the Apple Watch detects a fall, it will taps you on the watch and tells you in the form of an alert that it has detected a fall. Assuming you are conscious, if you need help, you can select to contact emergency services. In case if you don’t you can press the digital crown to dismiss the alert or tap “I’m OK” option. This flow works only if you are still moving after the fall.
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If you are immobile after the fall for a minute exactly, then the emergency services are called automatically. Once the call ends, alerts are send to your emergency contacts with information like your location and even what the watch detected.
If your Apple Watch detects that you’re moving, it waits for you to respond to the alert and won’t automatically call emergency services. If your watch detects that you’ve been immobile for about a minute, it will make the call automatically.
How to turn fall detection on or off
For this function to work, it has to be enabled in the Settings. There is an option to disable this feature if you choose to do so. In this section, let’s see how we can do that.
- Open the Watch app in your iPhone assuming you have already paired the device with your Apple Watch and you are wearing it.
- Make sure in the My Watch tab.
- Choose Emergency SOS from the tab.
- Under Emergency SOS, enable Fall Detention. Once you enable that, you will see two more options. Always On & Only during workouts. Please make the choice based on what you think would fit for you.
That’s how you can enable or disable fall detection in Apple Watch. This settings can be modified anytime you want as you would like.
Emergency Contacts & how to set them?
Now, as part of this feature, as soon as emergency SOS services are contacted, your personal emergency contacts would be alerted as to what’s happening with you and your personal location. But this requires you to actually set up your emergency contacts. Let’s see how we can do that in this section.
- First things first, open the Settings app in your iPhone.
- Select Health from Settings app.
- Under Health, choose choose Medical ID.
- Under Medical ID, Select the Edit option. Under Edit section, tap on add emergency contact as you can see below.
- Choose the contact from the list of your contacts. You can add only one phone number per contact. So, you can add more contacts if you want.
- Once choose, it will get added to the list of emergency. You could also add more than if you would like to. Once you are happy with the list of the emergency contacts, select Done at the top right corner.
Once you add an emergency contact, they will get an alert as a message everytime you call emergency SOS with details like location etc., That’s it. Now, you have your friends and family set as emergency contacts so that they will be intimated in case of any emergency.
See Also: How to Share Health Data with Friends on iPhone in iOS 15
This is one of those features that you wouldn’t appreciate until you experience it working miracles for you. Its a good thing that companies are filling these small gaps of our lives where technology could make a serious impact and can even help save your life.
I hope Apple keeps working on these so that they can improve the lives of their end users.
