Imagine if every time your phone hit the ground with a particular force (i.e., it fell out of your pack on a trail run), or you submerged it (i.e., you jumped into the lake with it in your pocket), Aero Methow Rescue Service and the police were automatically notified. How inconvenient would that be?
Oh, wait. You don’t have to imagine it, because that is what is happening, thanks to a fairly recent function on newer smartphones that most of us don’t even know about: Crash Detection.
Crash Detection is automatically enabled on many newer model phones and, at least around these parts — where we tend to be pretty active with our phones and at least as forgetful about leaving phones on top of the roofs of our cars as anybody else — is costing Aero Methow and other emergency responders time and money.
Aero Methow has responded to 15 such Crash Detection calls in recent months, all but one of them false alarms. When they get toned out in these situations, they are obligated to respond, so they do. And what they have been finding is a phone lying on the side of the trail, or on the edge of the grocery store parking lot, with no owner in sight.
This ties up resources, meaning that if you call 911 with a legitimate emergency while Aero Methow is busy responding to a phone-related false alarm, your response time will be longer.
The good news is that you can temporarily disable this function when you don’t need it, which for most of us is most of the time. Disabling on most phones involves going into Settings, then Emergency SOS, then scrolling to Crash Detection and toggling it off. When you’re headed into a situation where the Crash Detection function is warranted, simply enable it again.
I only learned about this last month and when I went into my Settings to investigate, I saw several other automatically enabled functions that I was not aware of, such as Call with Hold and Release, which involves holding the side button on one side and one of the volume buttons to summon 911.
Which suddenly made clear to me why, once last winter, when I was at a road crossing on the Winthrop Trail and bent down to click into my bindings, a siren blared from my pocket, my phone rang, and a dispatcher on the other end of the line asked me the nature of my emergency. I was simultaneously confused and mortified, as there happened to be quite a few other people at the road crossing. Somehow, when I bent down, both sides of the phone in my pocket got squeezed, and 911 was alerted.
Luckily, I was still with the phone and could prevent a wasted 911 response. But if my phone had fallen out of my pocket while I was whooshing downhill, I wouldn’t have been there to answer and call off the ambulance. The EMTs and paramedics would be searching the trail for the accident, while I continued on my journey, blissfully unaware of the wasted time of staff and volunteer EMTs and paramedics, not to mention the other costs associated with sending an ambulance crew on a doomed mission. Talk about mortifying.
Sometimes, and increasingly, it seems that smartphones are getting too smart for their — or our — own good.
