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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 in reply to Edward

    Exactly. Thanks God it doesn’t call any emergency number. With my 645 it triggered twice. First time I was standing pretty much still while taking a photo when hiking. Second time I was drying my hands in one of those hurricane air blowers where you put your hands inside the machine. I was hiking alone, just stopped in a mountain refuge. Scared my wife a lot when she received the alert, which my the way trashed my activity before that.

    The minute I completely removed the featire from the watch.

    Apple decided to call 911 because for them it really works.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Labronico
    Labronico said:
    Apple decided to call 911 because for them it really works.

    Not even close. Here's one of many articles online.  The Apple Community forum and Reddit is full of post about false fall detections being triggered just like Garmin. 

    www.google.com/.../apple-watches-are-wasting-our-time-accidentally-dialing-911-say-police-811938?amp=1

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to tess

    You may have confused the things because of the catchy article title.

    There are two functions on the Apple Watch: one for detected falls, which is the one that works very well; the other is when long pressing the side button, which prompts the user for an emergency call and does that unless dismissed.

    Wearing the watch too close to the hand leads to unwanted long pressures. That has nothing to do with falls, which is the topic here.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Labronico
    Labronico said:
    That has nothing to do with falls, which is the topic here.

    The topic is why Garmin doesn't call 911.  Anyway, it probably wasn't the best link to have posted, but a simple search shows the false fall detections on Apple watches without an accidental button press too. Obviously, neither company has the data to show which watch is more susceptible to the false detections, but if the implication is to say Apple doesn't have false detections unless there was an accidental button press, that would be incorrect. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    911 doesn't work for 6 billion of the people on the planet. Other emergency numbers are available.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to muppetkeeper

    Yes, and it would not be big job with GPS location map to right number, I've taken in this context the 911 to be the general EMS number.

    Or let the user change the EMS number.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    The reason is the same as why home alarms typically notify the alarm company and not the police.

    Too many false alarms.  An incident gets triggered, and if it when right to the police, they would send assistance, when it could just be you stopped and sat down too quickly.  In places, if your home alarm calls the cops and it's a false alarm, you get charged the cost of the response.

    Contacting a fried, spouse, etc allows them to call you and check if everything is okay in the event of a false alarm.