In Lake Pleasant, Arizona, the Apple Watch’s Crash Detection feature is being credited with helping emergency authorities locate a man after he was involved in an early morning car accident. Meanwhile, Tennesee officials are singing the praises of Crash Detection – despite the number of false alarms.
As detailed by the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, dispatch received a text from the 30-year-old man’s Apple Watch with his location infromation and a message saying he may have been in a car crash. Using this information, search and rescue teams were sent to the scene of the crash.
Ultimately, the Apple Watch user in question was located several hours later and he had walked “about five miles away” from the initial location of the crash. Still, without that Crash Detection notification being sent to emergency authorities, search and rescye teams wouldn’ve have been out looking for him in the first place.
YCSO Search and Rescue (SAR) personnel located a 30-year-old Surprise man several miles from his crashed vehicle in the pre-dawn hours Dec 29th.
Dispatch received the original alert via a 911 text from an Apple watch. Deputies found a single-vehicle rollover accident site on Castle Hot Springs Road, northwest of Lake Pleasant. When the driver could not be located, nearly 20 SAR volunteers and a DPS helicopter began a search. It culminated several hours later when the man, apparently seeking help, was found walking about five miles away.
He had suffered only minor injuries and refused medical treatment. He was taken back to Surprise by family.
Meanwhile, first responders in Maury County, Tennesee are also crediting Apple’s Crash Detection feature with alerting them to a severe crash on New Year’s Day. In this instance, the driver’s iPhone had been thrown out of the car during the crash, but was still able to contact emergency services on his behalf.
“We were able to come upon a scene where a car was in the middle of the creek,” a Maury County Fire official said. “Thankfully, the occupant inside the vehicle was able to get himself out safely, but had he been entrapped in that vehicle or unconscious, that iPhone notification would have absolutely saved his life.”
Maury County officials say, however, that iPhone Crash Detection calls turn out to be false alarms “about 75% of the time.” Still, those rescue teams say they’d “rather get false calls than miss a real emergency.”
Since the Crash Detection feature debuted with the iPhone 14 in 2022, Apple has continually worked to refine the feature’s algorithm via softeare updates. Apple has been collecting feedback from call centers impacted by Crash Detection false positives, and even sent engineers and other representatives to observe affected teams
