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Incident Detection has been rendered useless by a recent update

Former Member
Former Member
I have an Edge 520 and an iPhone SE. Incident Detection has worked perfectly on this for the last 18 months or so. It is now, fundamentally, broken.

It appears that, thanks to a recent update, in order for incident detection to work, your mobile device must have a network connection at the point at which you turn on your cycle computer. If your mobile device has no valid network connection at that point, the Edge reports that incident detection is being disabled because there are no contacts set. (When of course, there *are* contacts set, but for some reason the mobile device now has to read them from the network rather than locally from the device itself.)

This is, frankly, a stupid decision. I go mountain biking most weekends, and the car park where I leave my car - and where I turn on my Edge - is in a poor signal area, so 9 times out of 10, the Edge boots up, asks the mobile device for contacts, the mobile device can't find any, and I get told that incident detection is being disabled. Which then means I have no incident detection for the duration of that ride, the majority of which is in areas where there is a perfectly acceptable signal; so incident detection *could* work.

There is no sensible reason I can think of to require a network connection in order to store three contacts. I guess it might allow contacts to be synced between multiple phones, but most users surely have one phone and multiple Garmin devices (Edge, Fenix etc), which all sync with the same phone. Even if there is no mobile signal at one point on a route, assuming that there will be no mobile signal anywhere else on that route, and that it is therefore reasonable to disable incident detection completely, is a really bad idea.

Please go back to the way this worked before - this change has made incident detection far less useful than it used to be, and I cannot for the life of me work out what advantages it offers to anyone.
  • I've found that if I navigate to the Livetrack page in the app, then lock my phone and put it in my pocket, Livetrack has worked for me. It's not a great workaround, but if you want the feature to work, it feels like the only way until a fix comes out.
  • This just back from Garmin. Wish they would acknowledge the problem on here. Would save a lot of time and effort emailing them.
    Hi Gary,

    The issue you are referring to is something that we are aware of and are working hard towards a resolution, however, we do not have a time frame for this to be completed as yet.

    I have added you to the relevant case so that you can be notified once the issue has been resolved.

    We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.

    Kind regards,

    Victoria

    Garmin Europe

  • spiderbundy - I am sorry for the confusion. We have acknowledged the problem in a different thread (here) and I apologize I missed this one. We have changed how the contacts are used in the app and this is outlined in my comments in that post. If you did not change the contacts after the update to the Garmin Connect app, simply updating your contacts and adding them to your LiveTrack should resolve your problem.
  • I just fixed my incident and live track problem by disallowing access from the connect app to my contacts in the iOS settings. The contacts in incident and live track didn’t change but autostart livetrack and incident dtetection are back working again after months.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 6 years ago
    spiderbundy - I am sorry for the confusion. We have acknowledged the problem in a different thread (here) and I apologize I missed this one. We have changed how the contacts are used in the app and this is outlined in my comments in that post. If you did not change the contacts after the update to the Garmin Connect app, simply updating your contacts and adding them to your LiveTrack should resolve your problem.



    Last summer my 820 was reliable; I had a crash & broke my collarbone; the Incident Detection did its job and alerted my wife, which was great. A couple of months later I had recovered enough to start riding again and my Garmin did an update when I turned it on. Since then Bluetooth has been shoddy, the battery drains really quickly (now lasts about 3 hours) and incident detection is broken.

    I understand that the 820 is probably considered a legacy product by Garmin developers and this is just a bug on the backlog (or technical debt) that will probably never be fixed (fixing it costs money that could be spent on developing teh new model; software developers would rather work on something new / breaking something else than fixing last monsth regression failure)...

    So is there any way I could roll back the software/firmware updates and have the version I was using in August 2018? At laest that version was compatible with my device.
  • spiderbundy - I am sorry for the confusion. We have acknowledged the problem in a different thread (here) and I apologize I missed this one. We have changed how the contacts are used in the app and this is outlined in my comments in that post. If you did not change the contacts after the update to the Garmin Connect app, simply updating your contacts and adding them to your LiveTrack should resolve your problem.


    Matthew I have repeatedly tried to get INCEDENT DETECTION to function again, including deleting and reinstalling the app, deleting and reinstalling my emergency contacts and installing new different contacts and still INCEDENT DETECTION does not work. I am afraid that your statement that "simply updating your contacts" does not work.

    I have, however, managed to get LiveTrack to work by disabling the Auto Start facility.

    This issue has been going on for a number of months so PLEASE can we some information on a "work around" to temporarily solve the problem whilst Garmin get round to providing a proper fix.
  • Same issue here. Since the updated to GCM that created a Contacts section separate from indident detection (around November 2018 if I recall), each time I start a ride I get the message on my Edge "Incident Detection has been disabled because no contact in available in the CGM". However this is false, there are contacts. I also tried deleting them and putting them back, no success. However when I change them then Incident Detection get enabled. But I have to do this every simple ride. The Edge always report there is no contact available despite even showing them on the incident detection setup screen. This is not working as it should and the feature has been unusable since last fall. Hope there is a fix to this.
  • I'm afraid loads of users have been reporting this major problem with incident detection and live-track autostart for weeks now. Its been on most of the Edge and IOS forums since they moved contacts onto the cloud. It doesn't work, they don't respond, and have failed to fix it. Where is the support here Garmin?
    To add to my frustration since the latest IOS Connect update a couple of days ago my 520 has started the random reboot behavior which plagued my rides for weeks a few months back.