Bad Fall SOS

[Jenise]

So my brother recently bought an Apple Watch which he programmed to notify certain people if it detected a bad fall. I had no idea he'd done that or that this was even possible, however, until yesterday when it sent me a text message SOS alerting me to him having experienced a bad fall.

Well, he hadn't. He'd just ground up a big hunk of parmesan cheese in his Cuisinart. Apparently the vibration he absorbed while keeping the machine from jumping off the counter caused the alert.

Hilarious!

Too funny! It's a good idea to have your watch alert in case of a bad fall, but the implementation obviously needs a certain amount of refinement before it's ready for prime time. I'd think that a useful modification would be to prompt the user of the watch whether they wanted to cancel the alert before it get sent out. That would provide a way of avoiding false positives.

Good idea, and another is to take the watch off when doing certain chores that set it off. Sometimes a bad fall results in unconsciousness, and one would not be able to address the alert.

Good idea, and another is to take the watch off when doing certain chores that set it off. Sometimes a bad fall results in unconsciousness, and one would not be able to address the alert.

That's why I think that it should take a conscious effort to cancel. There would have to be a time-out feature so that, say, after 10 sec the alert gets sent unless explicitly cancelled.

I have two parentals with Apple watches for this reason. The detection is excellent, overall. If you just take a slip or a hard step down, that won't trigger it. There's a brief period where you can swipe to cancel a 911 call. Much better and cheaper than the heavily advertised "Life Alert" and similar, and even reasonably stylish.

Unrelated, I was amused to learn that since all cell phone standards since 4G/LTE are based on GSM, a European standard, you can dial 112 on a U.S. phone and reach 911, and vice versa in Europe. This doesn't work on landlines, obviously.

In the UK the emergency number is 999. I never understood this, as on a rotary dial phone 999 is the slowest 3-dight number to dial. In that context 112 makes a lot more sense.

-Paul W.

[Robin Garr]

In the UK the emergency number is 999. I never understood this, as on a rotary dial phone 999 is the slowest 3-dight number to dial. In that context 112 makes a lot more sense.

Rotary dial phones were largely replaced by push-button phones in the '90s. I remember noticing a dial pay phone in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, around 1992 and thinking how weird it was to see that.

According to the interwebs, 999 was chosen as Britain's emergency number in 1937, purportedly because the numbers are easy to find in a dark or smoky room.

I like the easy-to-find theory except that 0 is the last number on a rotary dial. So you would have to go to the end of the dial and then count back one to find 9. 111 would make more sense--easier to find than 999 and a the fastest 3-digit number to dial.

-Paul W.

But you cannot lead with a '1' because that is recognized as the beginning of a long-distance call. Hence, the large urban centers in the US were assigned 212, 213, 214....