The iPhone 14 has an Emergency SOS feature
(Picture: Apple)With the iPhone 14 and Watch 8, Apple proudly introduced Crash Detection — a potentially life-saving feature that promises to detect the movements caused by a car accident and then automatically source help for the owner, even if you are incapacitated.
Unfortunately, this feature appears to be a little overzealous. The acceleration, fast turns, and sudden stops pulled off by skiers are triggering false positives — something which may concern those en route to a half-term ski break. After all, nobody wants to waste the time of mountain-rescue teams.
Across the Atlantic, it does seem a persistent problem. For instance, in Colorado, the emergency services director of Summit County, Trina Dummer, told the New York Times there had been 185 such false accident reports on the slopes in a nine-day period alone.
In France, the news channel BFMTV has reported that this problem is taking root in the Alps, with a station in Val-d’Isère claiming to have received several false alarms via these new Apple devices in recent months.
The Standard has independently verified the Val-d’Isère story reported in the BFMTV segment but discovered this was restricted to a handful of incidents. We also reached out to multiple skiing resorts across Europe, most of whom had heard nothing of the problem.
For example, Rega — the Swiss Air Rescue service — said that it was “not aware of any false alarms due to this function” according to its media spokesperson, Mahias Gehrig.
Apple spokesperson Alex Kirschner told the New York Times that an update to “optimise” the technology was released last year and perhaps this has already helped. It’s also likely that the company will continue to refine this technology, which is still only six months old.
Crash Detection and skiers: What can be done?
While at face value, the problem appears similar to last year’s reports of rollercoasters triggering Crash Detection, skiing presents a tougher problem. For one thing, skiers wear multiple layers of clothing, which obscures the loud warning noise that Apple’s new watches and phones make when they countdown towards making an emergency call.
For another, thrill rides have a unique design that makes their movements easy to spot as rollercoaster expert Brendan Walker told The Standard last year.
Skiers behave more like cars, with amateurs hitting average speeds of between 20 and 40mph. Skiers, Walker explains, would not be as straightforward to differentiate, due to their highly variable routes and lack of inversions.
“Skiing has two problems,” he told The Standard. “One: a large change in acceleration magnitude — 8G to 0G. And two: a high rate of change in acceleration, or ‘jerk’. All this could lead to the conclusion that ‘something with a lot of force has just happened quite suddenly’.
“Throw in a few unexpected snow mounds to give additional spikes to the forces recorded, and it’s easy to imagine why the iPhone crash detection is being triggered accidentally by the relatively normal actions of skiing.”
It’s not just the diagnosis that is harder — the solutions are, too. The relative safety of thrill rides and the fact they’re in busy locations with plenty of witnesses means that Crash Detection is arguably unnecessary. With that in mind, you could simply prevent the feature from working in the GPS co-ordinates of major theme parks without user intervention and sidestep the problem. Skiing accidents, on the other hand, are more common, so blocking the GPS co-ordinates of major ski resorts is far from a perfect solution. And, in any case, it wouldn’t account for those who go off-piste.
Should skiers disable Apple Crash Detection?
Those heading out for half-term ski breaks do have the option to disable the new Crash Detection feature. That’s the recommendation of Aspen Mountain, which The Times reports has put signs up at its lift lines and ticket offices, encouraging skiers to update their Apple software or disable Crash Detection entirely in order to “prevent unnecessary trips to the slopes” by emergency services.
This is an approach you can take, but it’s only relevant on the iPhone 14 (both regular and Pro), Apple Watch 8, and Apple Watch Ultra. You can do this by going to the Settings menu on your device, selecting Emergency SOS, and toggling Crash Detection off.
That obviously means that, if you are incapacitated in a skiing accident, your phone or watch won’t raise the alarm. As things stand, it feels like deactivation is a bridge too far. In busy resorts, being discovered post-accident might not be a problem. As Sheriff Brett Schroetlin told the New York Times after making the decision to deprioritise Apple’s automated calls: “It’s rare that someone falls on the mountain and there’s not a passerby. We’re hoping to get an actual 911 call from the person or someone on the scene.”
