Apple’s iPhone 14 smartphone and Apple Watch are reportedly sending false alarms as the Crash Detection feature is putting emergency resources on stress. According to reports by AppleInsider, Apple devices in the US send crash warnings to dispatchers which were automated at the Summit County 911 Center. But none of them were involved in any emergency.
Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 Center siad, “We are not in the practice of disregarding calls.” Dummer added, “These calls involve a tremendous amount of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrollers. And I don’t think we’ve ever had an actual emergency event.”
An increase in the number of accidental emergency calls from skiers have been seen from earlier this month due to this feature in the Summit County dispatchers in the US. The new models of Apple that received the Crash Detection feature offered phone detection when the user has a fall and an emergency call is made to assistance service.
An instance was reported by the Wall Street Journal wherein a woman was carrying an iPhone 14 while riding a roller coaster in an amusement park at Cincinnati. When she checked her phone after the ride, several missed calls and voice messages from an emergency dispatcher were received.
This is not the first time that something like this happened with an Apple feature. A study by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association that was published back in 2022 found that several features on Apple Watch that measure heart rate and atrial fibrillation in wearers were sending people to emergency falsely. The study found that 264 people went to the ERs after receiving alerts on their Apple Watch. After visiting a doctor, 30 of them received a “clinically actionable cardiovascular diagnosis of interest.”
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