How does the emergency contact work?

7348158 said:

Anyone know why?

There may be several reasons:

• The incident detection was not enabled
• You did not have the phone with you,
• The phone had no access to mobile data
• The phone was not connected to your watch
• The emergency contact email or SMS did not work for some reason
• The impact was not strong enough to trigger the alarm
• ...

When setting up the Incident Detection, you should test it, to see whether the messages really reach the emergency contact. You can trigger the alarm manually to check it out, or when the auto-detection fails. Some more details about the function are available in the User Manual for Venu: https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/venu/EN-US/GUID-F5AFA4E1-C3BE-4649-925F-9308B3257C29.html 

7348158 said:

So the question is, how strong does an impact need to be to be detected?

Good question, but unfortunately the exact deceleration value is nowhere documented, as far as I see. And even if it were, it would probably not tell you much. I am afraid the only practical way to see when it starts kicking in, is by testing it.

But I did test it..I was running at a pace of 7.32/km, tripped on a tree root and landed on my chin. Was I not running fast enough? Did I not fall hard enough (my bruised and swollen chin would disagree)? Or do I need to be knocked unconscious first?

7348158 said:

Was I not running fast enough? Did I not fall hard enough (my bruised and swollen chin would disagree)?

I really do not know, I was not there. Perhaps the hand wearing the watch did not decelerate as fast as your chin. Perhaps the hand landed relatively softly, and the watch simply did not consider it an accident. You can try hitting a solid obstacle with the hand wearing the watch, with varying intensity, to see whether and when it starts to trigger the alarm.

In any case, I am afraid we cannot help you more here on the user forum, since as far as I know there is no parameter that you could adjust to modify the sensitivity. You better contact Garmin's Support and ask them about it directly, though I doubt they give you any better advice.

... you could also post a link to the concerned activity, so that we can look at the background data. We could perhaps see how strong the deceleration was. Even better may be if you export the activity in Garmin Connect Web as "original", and post the zip file here (see the function Insert » Image/video/file » upload).

From my experience it is the sudden stop that decides whether an alert should be sent or not. There is a delay period that if you start to move again shortly after the stop an alert will not be sent. 

e7andy said:

From my experience it is the sudden stop that decides whether an alert should be sent or not. There is a delay period that if you start to move again shortly after the stop an alert will not be sent.

Yes, that's correct, and indeed another possibility why the message was not sent. The delay is 30s. However, for triggering the emergency alert, the stop really needs to be rather abrupt. Simple stopping to run won't trigger it (at least it never happened to me), so if the deceleration of the fall did not surpass the threshold, the alert might not even be triggered. We could perhaps see it better in the activity file - both whether there was a pause greater than 30s after the fall, and perhaps even the deceleration values.

How do I find the activity files?

7348158 said:

How do I find the activity files?

As written previously, export it from Garmin Connect Web as "original". Here you go for more detailed instructions:

How Do I Export Data Out of Garmin Connect?