iPhones and Apple Watches Could Detect a Car Crash and Auto-Dial 911 Starting Next Year
Apple is planning a new feature for the iPhone and Apple Watch that would enable the devices to detect if you are involved in a car crash and automatically dial 911 for emergency services, according to The Wall Street Journal's Rolfe Winkler.
Apple plans to launch the "crash detection" feature in 2022, the report claims, citing company documents and people familiar with the matter.
The feature would use iPhone and Apple Watch sensors like the accelerometer to "detect car accidents as they occur" in part by measuring a sudden spike in gravitational force, more commonly known as g-force, on impact.
The report claims that Apple has been testing the feature in the past year by collecting data shared anonymously by iPhone and Apple Watch users, and the devices have apparently already detected more than 10 million suspected vehicle impacts. As with any feature in testing, the report cautions that Apple could choose not to release it.
From the report:
Apple products have already detected more than 10 million suspected vehicle impacts, of which more than 50,000 included a call to 911.
Apple has been using the 911 call data to improve the accuracy of its crash-detection algorithm, since an emergency call associated with a suspected impact gives Apple more confidence that it is indeed a car crash, according to the documents.
The feature sounds similar to Fall Detection on the Apple Watch Series 4 and newer, which can detect if the wearer has experienced a hard fall and automatically call emergency services unless they indicate that they are okay.
Google already offers a car crash detection feature on some recent Pixel smartphone models.
Popular Stories
The iMessage service that Apple users to send messages to one another appears to be down for some users, and messages are failing to go out or are taking an extra long time to send. There are numerous reports about the issue on social networks and a spike of outage reports on Down Detector, but Apple's System Status page is not yet reporting an outage. Update: Apple's status page says...
There are concerning reports on Reddit that Apple's latest iOS 17.5 update has introduced a bug that causes old photos that were deleted – in some cases years ago – to reappear in users' photo libraries. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other...
This year's upcoming iPhone 16 Pro Max is expected to get a boost in overall size from 6.7-inches to 6.9-inches, and a new image gives us a good idea of how the current iPhone 15 Pro Max compares to what could be Apple's largest ever iPhone. The image above, posted on X by ZONEofTECH, shows a dummy model representing the iPhone 16 Pro Max alongside an actual iPhone 15 Pro Max. Dummy...
A bug in iOS 17.5 is apparently causing photos that have been deleted to reappear, and the issue seems to impact even iPhones and iPads that have been erased and sold off to other people. A Reddit user wiped an iPad following Apple's guidelines in September of 2023 before selling it off to a friend. That friend updated the iPad to iPadOS 17.5 this week, and began seeing the Reddit user's old ...
Some new M4 iPad Pro models are exhibiting a visible static grain pattern across the OLED display, according to several user reports on Reddit (1, 2, 3) and the MacRumors Forums. Image credit: MacRumors user bk215 Users who see the grain generally report that it is most noticeable in dark environments with the display set at a low to medium brightness while viewing content with gray or muted...
In April, Apple updated its guidelines to allow retro game emulators on the App Store, and several popular emulators have already been released. The emulators released so far allow iPhone users to play games released for older consoles from Nintendo, Sony, SEGA, Atari, and others. A list of some popular emulators available on the App Store so far follows. Released Delta Delta is...
Top Rated Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall
I think only cars with something like OnStar have this built in, and I believe it's a pay/subscription service. My wife's new Rav 4 came with that package for an extra cost, which we declined.