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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The “crash detection” and “fall detection” features on the Apple iPhone 14 and watches automatically call 911 when the devices detect a sudden stop that, in concept, means the user has been involved in a car crash.

I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason.

“We are communicating with Apple to get them to pay more attention to this but it feels like we are trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub.”

An easy way to get them to pay attention might be to just loudly announce the intention to, and then start ignoring, automated calls from them, or at least deprioritise them in favour of human calls. The equivalent of nullrouting DDoS traffic.

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> An easy way to get them to pay attention

They did.

"We did have a conversation with Apple about the crash detection this fall and they told us they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix they were hoping to have out in the first quarter of 2023"

As did some other people.

"His dispatch supervisor has contacted Apple and received a response that the company is aware of the conflict between skiers and the crash detection technology and are working on a fix, Schroetlin said."

Good, now that they're aware, surely they wouldn't mind paying the town for the resources their feature wasted?

Start billing Apple for the fake calls.

Or prosecuting.

All apple has to do is ignore the invoices...

It happened to me last week when I tossed my coat forgetting the phone was in the pocket. I was very confused when I came back 30s later and dispatch was on the speakerphone asking what the emergency was

I don't really understand how false positives can be eliminated. Maybe it's still better overall.

> I don't really understand how false positives can be eliminated.

They can't, which basically means it's a poor feature and shouldn't have been implemented.

Seems like naïveté and myopia are endemic to tech companies, large and small. Smart people who are confident yet clueless.

Since a false positive generally causes much less harm than missing a true positive making no false positives a requirement is generally a terrible idea.

This really depends on how many of false calls happen. There is a point at which these start being detrimental.

As I mentioned in another post, Apple shouldn’t be farming out the determination to emergency services. They can provide an intermediary to determine the severity. The situation is such that a phone or watch does not have enough information to properly evaluate a situation as an emergency or not.

Fine people who call 911 frivolously? Including by using a device that does this.

Let people know that they must buy a second phone for use with skiing.

> I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason.

Even just dropping it.

I’m bemused at how many cracked screen devices I see given how often I drop mine and yet it never seems to break.

It’s all about the angle I think. The only time I cracked mine was a very short drop (two feet at most) but it hit flush with a tile floor

it depends on where exactly it falls. Mine cracked after it hit a rock I think, there is little hole that looks like made by something spiky.

I have fallen while cruising on skateboard

I drop my phone a lot, but having a glass screen protector, I believe, adds the extra reinforcement needed to disapate the shock and prevents my screen from cracking.

It's a fundamentally stupid idea, the sensors in the watch are woefully insufficient to detect such an event with any reasonable amount of precision. Bumping your watch into a tree would generate massive G forces, hitting your head while your arms are flailing would barely register.

At minimum, it would require biosensors that detect the owner is still wearing the watch yet his life signs are significantly perturbed from the norm: irregular heart beat and oxygen saturation, hypothermia, AI-informed sound interpretation for things like gasping for air etc.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

It is not as dumb as just looking for spikes in acceleration, but specific patterns and integrating acceleration to get position and velocity history in order to match situations that look like car crashes. Obviously the real world is demonstrating some bugs with bad matches that didn’t get found in testing, but this isn’t surprising or some big failure. Unfortunate it is bothering emergency workers, but is it actually impacting emergency services?

It doesn’t appear Apple knows what they’re talking about or doing.

Mine only goes off when I fall.. so I do think they know what they are doing. My mother is 72 and lives alone, I plan to get her an apple watch specifically to detect falls as I have been very impressed with its ability to detect them.

> specific patterns and integrating acceleration to get position and velocity history in order to match situations that look like car crashes

And that's a fundamentally stupid idea.

> is it actually impacting emergency services?

Yes, but that's an externality, so don't worry about it.

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