Incident Detection appears to be completely useless an buggy.

I activated Incident Detection (ID) a couple of weeks ago, and since then it has activated twice. Once whilst calmly walking my dog down the road recording a walking activity, and on a second occasion whilst not recording an activity and being asleep. On both occasions it stated an alert was sent to my contacts tracking my location.

Not only where both occasions false positives, but even if they had been genuine incidents, nothing was sent to my contacts. So clearly the feature is useless.

However, not only is it useless, but it seems impossible to turn off incident detection but keep Assistance, so it's actually making another useful feature unusable too. The reason for this is there is no option to disable Incident Detection (why?), all you can do is disable it for individual activities, which seem like a stupid decision. So the only way to get ID to show as disabled was to remove my emergency contacts, and I needed it to show as disabled as it last triggered when not recording an activity.

Do the devs know how utterly useless and unreliable this feature is?

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  • and on a second occasion whilst not recording an activity and being aslee

    The only way how an Incident alert can be triggered outside an activity, is by initiating it manually - pressing…

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  • and on a second occasion whilst not recording an activity and being aslee

    The only way how an Incident alert can be triggered outside an activity, is by initiating it manually - pressing the Light button for some 15s and then releasing before the watch shuts down. So I suspect you accidentally pressed against the button while sleeping. Or perhaps the button is slightly stuck - in that case I recommend letting the watch for an hour or more in lukewarm water, in order to remove any sweat, dirt, or salt residua from the slits around the buttons.

    Not only where both occasions false positives, but even if they had been genuine incidents, nothing was sent to my contacts. So clearly the feature is useless.

    For the messaging to work, the watch has to be connected to a phone with active mobile data (if email notifications are used), and also the watch has to have a GPS signal, which is not the case when you sleep indoors (or even outdoors with no outdoor activity in progress).

    See more details about the feature here: Setting Up Incident Detection on a Garmin Device | Garmin Customer Support

  • I managed to set off the incident detection on my Epix pro whilst walloping a pack of wood which wasn’t quite even with another lump of wood,

    it went off after I’d hit the pack 4 or 5 times really hard.

    Despite trying to cancel the alert it still sent an alert to my contacts.

    My phone did ask me if I was okay and initiated a message to send saying so.

    So it can be set off outside of an activity.

    i would like to know how hard you would have to fall or come off your bike for it to go off in a real accident.