Owners of the latest generation of iPhones and Apple Watches have reported a bug with the new collision detection feature, resulting in emergency calls to 911 when the user goes skiing and falls. Following the New York Post’s coverage, Apple publicly acknowledged being aware of the issue.
According to the New York Post, an Apple spokesperson said it was “in contact with 911 call centers that are currently experiencing a spike in 911 robocalls due to the collision detection feature and let them get their feedback”. The spokesperson, however, declined to comment on how the feature might be updated in the future, if at all, to reduce the frequency of these false positives.
The Post says 911 centers near ski mountains have been “overwhelmed with accidental, automated calls from phones and watches of fallen skiers and snowboarders” since the start of the winter ski season. The center in Green County, New York, for example, had 22% hang-ups and miscalls last December compared to the same month in 2021, and says it is still operating at a noticeably higher call rate. higher than previous years.
The crash detection feature, announced last fall at the iPhone 14 launch event, is supposed to alert emergency services and the user’s emergency contacts when it detects a crash. car based on extreme acceleration or deceleration, and as such offers the potential to save lives. But there have been concerns about its over-sensitivity; in October, some users reported, for example, that it was triggering on a roller coaster.
The difficulty is that in terms of the physical forces acting on the body, car crashes are similar to a number of other experiments, and adjusting the algorithm to detect one while ignoring the others is a complex task. As Apple Vice President Ron Huang told TechCrunch in the fall, “There’s no silver bullet, in terms of enabling collision detection…Your change of speed, combined with impact force, combined with pressure change, combined with sound level… it’s all quite a dynamic algorithm.
It is clear, however, that something has to change, as false positives have repercussions for those who actually experience emergencies. As the Post reports, calls triggered by crash detection “have strained dispatch centers, as well as police and emergency medical services, which sometimes respond to the location on the ski mountain. where the unanswered call came from”. While Apple is working on a solution, we recommend that those who take an iPhone 14 or Apple Watch Ultra on the slopes – or on roller coasters, for that matter – temporarily disable collision detection to avoid an erroneous call to the 911.
