Related
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Why doesn't Incidence Detection call 911?

Fredrik_Coulter
over 4 years ago

In a different thread (about the status of the 955) a poster said that his Apple Watch directly calls 911 as well as his emergency contacts.  I've heard from someone else that their Apple Watch also called 911, and their emergency contacts got to trace their route after the ambulance picked them up and brought them to the hospital.

But Garmin's devices don't call 911 directly; they only call the emergency contacts.  (Yes, technically it's the paired smart phone that does the calling.  That's not the point of this question.)

I had heard that 911 didn't want to deal with automated calls and texts, but apparently Apple has figured out a way around it.  So the question is "why hasn't Garmin also figured out how to call 911 directly?"

(A follow up question is for Apple Watch users, how well does calling 911 work in other countries?  Most countries apparently have different numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-1-1).  Does the Apple Watch connect to the proper service in those countries, too?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Why should it. Becouse not al the accidents are that urgent !

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Nothing to stop you can adding 911 as one of your emergency contacts. Risk is that you make yourself hugely unpopular with your local 911 service, depending on how often you fall of your bike

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to CloggyAbroad

    Doesn't it send SMS? Not call. Can you SMS 911? At least in country where I live, the emergency SMS service is only for those who have registered and meant to those having medical reasons preferring text over voice. 

    I've activated the ID, it will also send info to the ones you add there. Which I didn't know or it didn't tell, which was kind of "what is this?" moment, where then I needed to explain what it is and what does it do.

    I think I've managed to get ID to activate twice after that. Once I just stopped running quickly after finishing sprint and leaned to my knees and it thought I crashed. Then just aborted it. Second time I did fall in trail running part of swim run, didn't even have my phone with me, but still aborted it before it would have tried to do anything.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jmto

    Apparently YMMV.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-to-9-1-1 
    Doesn't seem preferred and good idea in real emergencies.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jmto

    In the UK (where I live) you can register your number and then 999 (the UK emergency number) will accept text messages from you. Still, falling of your bike does not warrant automatically contacting 999

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    So it seems like people with Apple Watches are more damaged when they fall than people with Garmin devices?

    (The one time I fell and triggered my Incidence Detection, I was able to stop the texts before they went out.)

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to CloggyAbroad
    CloggyAbroad said:
    Still, falling of your bike does not warrant automatically contacting 999

    No it doesn't, that's the reason it has the timeout where you can abort it. If you are not in the state to abort it, it might be a cause for contacting EMS. But for me, I would think that the timeout should be longer to avoid some false alarms.

    And for the EMS, they get a lot of calls from mobile phones in pockets, which is already a problem, don't know how much would ID add to it. I would guess not so much. But phone call would be much better than SMS. Then the EMS could listen and you could answer if you are in a state that you can talk. It would not require any registrations and so on.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    At least in Finland (where I live), you can only send SMSs to 911 if you've registered to use the emergency text service (which is free). But even in that case, you are not allowed to send automated SMSs (like incident detection does).

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Bitti

    Torille. 

    jmto said:
    At least in country where I live, the emergency SMS service is only for those who have registered and meant to those having medical reasons preferring text over voice. 

    I was also talking about Finland. I've not registered, so didn't know that automated SMS is banned. Good to know.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    basically my fr945 think i had an incident every time when i wash my hand during an activity.