It wasn't that long ago that we reported there were many false Crash Detection alarms. In just Minnesota, USA alone in 2022, there are already 700 false alarms. Meanwhile, several Japanese emergency service units got a total of 919 false calls within a month.
According to sources, this is due to the holiday season whereby one of the fire departments of the Kita-Alps received 134 false calls between 16 December 2022 and 23 January 2023 from skiers. The skier's iPhone 14 Crash Detection was activated numerous times when they went down the ski slopes.
Like the rollercoaster cases in the US, skiing activities have triggered Crash Detections thanks to the high speed and impacts made. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the system would confuse skiing as car accidents. However, the iPhone 14 usually would begin a countdown before calling the emergency service units but the users probably didn't hear the siren when skiing.
From these false alarms, Apple has been working with many local emergency services, collecting their feedback to minimize the issue. However, it's not to say that Crash Detection didn't have any success. A passenger's iPhone 14 phone alerted responders in a fatal car crash, a man was lost and found in Alaska, and two women stranded in the wilderness got rescued.
Apple has responded to this issue of false alarms before, as "there's no silver bullet" for Crash Detection due to the complicated software and algorithm calculation. Well, we think the best way to deal with it is to turn off the Crash Detection SOS emergency feature but then again, not many people are inclined to switch it back on after their activity.
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