As we already informed you, Apple presented the new generations of iPhone and Apple Watches, which, among other things, received an important function for drivers – they recognize a car accident and call the emergency services themselves.
We are talking about the devices iPhone 14 and 14 Plus (and the new Pro versions), as well as the Apple Watch Series 8, the budget model Watch SE and the titanium version for athletes Series 8 Ultra. All these devices received the Crash Detection function, which allows the electronic gadget to determine that the owner has suffered a serious accident.
Apple has started to implement something similar in watches before, but the solution was far more primitive: the previous Apple Watch had a „fall detection“ feature that detected a strong impact and asked the user if everything was OK. If he doesn’t respond, the watch will call emergency services.
Now a step forward has been taken specifically for the recognition of car accidents. The system uses data from a new dual-core accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS. Apple is doing a series of crash tests, and developers are also analyzing 10 million potentially dangerous incidents to tune the system to most accurately recognize when an incident needs to be automatically reported.
For this purpose, the company also uses anonymous data collected from actually used iPhones and Apple Watches during crashes. As a result, the device’s algorithms have learned to detect different types of car collisions. The devices are able to, say, understand that the car has turned. Sensors fix overloads up to 256 G.
After detecting that an accident has occurred, the device automatically contacts emergency services and sends them the location and sound from the microphone (by the way, iPhones also get an emergency satellite communication function that works where there is no coverage of mobile operators ).