Apple Watch May Have Saved A Biker's Life (krem.com) 63
"A Spokane man is saying that an Apple Watch helped save his dad's life following a bicycle crash at Doomsday Hill," reports a local TV station:
According to a Facebook post, Gabe Burdett was on his way to meet up with his father Bob last weekend at Riverside State Park, but Bob wasn't at their meet up spot. Burdett received a text from his father's Apple Watch, which read, "Emergency SOS Bob Burdett called emergency services from this approximate location after Apple Watch detected a hard fall." Not only had the watch texted Burdett, it also called 911 with his father's location, he said.
Bob had flipped his bike at the bottom of Doomsday Hill and hit his head, knocking him unconscious, Burdett said. Thanks to the watch, Bob was able to be picked up by emergency services and transported to the hospital within 30 minutes of the fall occurring.
Gabe's Facebook post includes a picture of the now-damaged Apple Watch on his father's wrist in the hospital. The Apple Watch even texted a map showing the son his father's new location at the hospital.
And now "Dad is doing great, clear X-Rays and CT scan, but a little sore for sure!"
Bob had flipped his bike at the bottom of Doomsday Hill and hit his head, knocking him unconscious, Burdett said. Thanks to the watch, Bob was able to be picked up by emergency services and transported to the hospital within 30 minutes of the fall occurring.
Gabe's Facebook post includes a picture of the now-damaged Apple Watch on his father's wrist in the hospital. The Apple Watch even texted a map showing the son his father's new location at the hospital.
And now "Dad is doing great, clear X-Rays and CT scan, but a little sore for sure!"
This stuff is the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hate or Love Apple, this type of stuff is the future and the promise of wearable devices. Soon they will be monitoring blood pressure, checking for infections, and much more. The future is bright.
Re:This stuff is the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This stuff is the future... (Score:4, Informative)
The Spokefest bike route that uses Doomsday hill (there are 3 routes available for various skill levels) goes downhill, not uphill as it does with Bloomsday.
During Bloomsday run, they have a stop with water and first aid set up at the halfway point, just across from where my band used to play back in the day.
It's called Doomsday hill not as a play on words, but as the point where the largest number of participants give up the ghost....
It's a great ride on any of the courses however. It is also not an older event, but a yearly event that was held on 9/8/19 this year.
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My bad, read the map upside down.....
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Years ago my band used to perform during the race at the halfway point of the hill, an old Acme concrete gravel pit. Good crowds as a lot of people would stop and catch their breath at that point. We get an average of aro
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Hate or Love Apple, this type of stuff is the future and the promise of wearable devices. Soon they will be monitoring blood pressure, checking for infections, and much more. The future is bright.
If it's going to be that bright, we're going to need some (Apple) shades.
Re: This stuff is the future... (Score:1)
The stuff of the future? This technology has been around for half a decade already. It is not new at all and Apple is very late to the party.
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The stuff of the future? This technology has been around for half a decade already. It is not new at all and Apple is very late to the party.
The technology has possibly been around for a few years (but, AFAICT, not all together in a standalone, cellular-equipped smartwatch); but the seamless and elegant integration and implementation is all Apple.
That's their special talent, and they do it better, and more consistently, than anybody else.
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Soon they will be monitoring blood pressure, checking for infections, and much more.
The infection monitoring will, of course, require a bluetooth-paired suppository - available in space gray and rose gold.
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No (PRODUCT) RED ?
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Just waiting for one with a battery live > 0.8 days and that is compatible with non-Apple devices.
Some of the fitness trackers are getting there but not quite yet. They need to be more open so I can control the data and do whatever processing I want on it, not just what they offer.
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...only if Apple can convince me that it is discarding and not profiting from the biometric data it collects from me. You don't need to keep more than a few seconds worth for a heartbeat check. Apple has medical doctors on the payroll that are trying to figure out how to monetize all that free biometric data (full disclosure: I work for one of those doctors as a data wrangler) and the insurance companies are all for it. We need much tighter regulatory control before I personally would ever consider gi
I would love to see some statistics (Score:2)
As good as this story is as a one-off its an incredible fail. The most popular wearable device which has these features as standard, and a full year after introduction I surely must have saved more than one person's life.
I'd be interested in knowing how many lives it is really saving (it's probably quite good) and if it its not I'd be interested in why (100% of people I know with an Apple watch 4, which is admittedly not many, have disabled this feature).
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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The standard mechanical “Railroad Certified” watch has saved countless lives by making train collisions, derailments, etc., far less common than they used to be. No one’s singing ITS praises. Hrmf.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] for more on this amazing lifesaving device.
Maybe because time based signalling was outlawed in many countries, because it didn't prevent accidents
In the UK, the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 introduced a series of requirements on matters such as the implementation of interlocked block signalling and other safety measures as a direct result of the Armagh rail disaster in that year.
The absolute block system came into use gradually during the 1850s and 1860s and became mandatory in the United Kingdom after Parliament passed legislation in 1889 following a number of accidents, most notably the Armagh rail disaster. This required block signalling for all passenger railways, together with interlocking, both of which form the basis of modern signalling practice today. Similar legislation was passed by the United States around the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Railroad watches beat the iWatch (Score:4, Insightful)
Plenty of people did, but that was 1891. Since then, we've now standardized accurate time (up to GPS accuracy, if you really care).
One piece of technology from one era doesn't make another from a different era more or less impressive.
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100% of people I know with an Apple watch 4, which is admittedly not many, have disabled this feature.
Are they also the type of people who disable their airbags and refuse to wear seatbelts?
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This feature is great! When I drunkenly fell down the stairs, my watch promptly called an ambulance which I didn't need and I got billed $2000. Apple are the best!
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and your ambulance was driven by... Albert Einstein!
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This feature is great! When I drunkenly fell down the stairs, my watch promptly called an ambulance which I didn't need and I got billed $2000. Apple are the best!
And if you'd fallen just a LITTLE harder and suffered a subarachnoid hemmhorage; you'd be Goddammed ECSTATIC your life didn't end at the bottom of those stairs.
No matter how much you actually deserved it.
Ingrate.
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As good as this story is as a one-off its an incredible fail. The most popular wearable device which has these features as standard, and a full year after introduction I surely must have saved more than one person's life.
I'd be interested in knowing how many lives it is really saving (it's probably quite good) and if it its not I'd be interested in why (100% of people I know with an Apple watch 4, which is admittedly not many, have disabled this feature).
Are those people under 65? If so, then the feature is defaults to "Off", anyway.
If they are under 65, they probably were just trying out the feature, and didn't pay attention to the warning about "high impact activity" more likely to cause false-triggers of the feature (which is why it taps your wrist and asks if you are ok, then waits a minute before calling 911).
See "Fall Detection" on this page:
https://www.apple.com/apple-wa... [apple.com]
And see the screenshot of the warning under "Fall Detection" about "high impac
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As good as this story is as a one-off its an incredible fail. The most popular wearable device which has these features as standard, and a full year after introduction I surely must have saved more than one person's life.
Many more, actually. Mostly by alerting people to unknown heart irregularities:
https://www.hackread.com/7-tim... [hackread.com]
https://www.runnersworld.com/r... [runnersworld.com]
https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/23... [9to5mac.com]
https://www.mensjournal.com/he... [mensjournal.com]
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle... [scmp.com]
https://www.mensxp.com/technol... [mensxp.com]
In this story, a Doctor with an Apple Watch placed it on a fellow restaurant-patron's wrist to help that Doctor diagnose Atrial Fibrillation in the other person. Pretty cool!
https://www.indiatoday.in/tech... [indiatoday.in]
Here are some Apple videos o
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I'm curious how many false positives it's caused.
Well if we're going to play that game... (Score:1)
How many people have been injured or even killed so that someone could rob them of their Apple Watch? Sure, your fancy jewelry could save your life in an esoteric situation but like any other piece of gaudy jewelry, it can quickly make you a target.
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So you better wear a Rolex...
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How many people have been injured or even killed so that someone could rob them of their Apple Watch? Sure, your fancy jewelry could save your life in an esoteric situation but like any other piece of gaudy jewelry, it can quickly make you a target.
OMG. So you never leave your house, because you might get hit by a bus? Never eat food, because it might have gone bad? Life is risky.
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Not at all. I simply don't flaunt my wealth and do what I can to improve the world for everyone.
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Not at all. I simply don't flaunt my wealth and do what I can to improve the world for everyone.
Not wearing a watch because you might get mugged has nothing to do with flaunting wealth or improving the world.
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Wearing a watch isn't flaunting my wealth. Ok, I travelled the world wearing a watch that was worth the annual income of an entire village I visited but.. it was also worth less than the cost of a fake rolex in Hong Kong.
Watches are tools that can also be jewellery. Some people wear them for utility purposes.
Re:Well if we're going to play that game... (Score:4, Insightful)
"How many people have been injured or even killed so that someone could rob them of their Apple Watch?"
Not many I imagine, the watch locks as soon as it's taken off your wrist, rendering it useless to other people.
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Looking for a sales boost or no news week? (Score:1)
Are sales of the Apple Watch doing so bad that we need to go for these stories?
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Are sales of the Apple Watch doing so bad that we need to go for these stories?
Exactly the opposite. Apple Watch is now the most popular watch on earth:
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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Not really. The most popular watch on Earth right now is Overwatch.
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Exactly the opposite. Apple Watch is now the most popular watch on earth:
Or it was in 2017, when that article was written. And I suspect they must have some really idiosyncratic way of counting: it's really hard for me to believe Apple sold more $400 watches than, say, Timex sold $40 watches. Note the headline, "Apple's Watch just beat Rolex to become the most popular on Earth". How could Rolex be "the most popular on Earth"? (On the other hand, I hear many people now don't use watches, so maybe sales have started to skew more toward the expensive end of the scale. Still, "Role
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Ah, okay, this makes more sense [businessinsider.com]: As of September, 2016, "In Apple's keynote today announcing its new smartwatch, the company claimed that it was the number 2 watchmaker in the world for watch revenue in 2015, right behind Rolex." So apparently "most popular" now means most revenue, rather than greatest number.
So, Garmin 5 Years Ago (Score:1)
Garmin has been doing this for years with their bike computers.
I'm so glad Apple is finally catching up to the technology of half a decade ago.
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Garmin has been doing this for years with their bike computers.
I'm so glad Apple is finally catching up to the technology of half a decade ago.
A bike computer is not a watch.
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A bike computer is not a watch.
Well they're priced like an Apple Watch [garmin.com], in any case. But they're closer in size to an iPhone SE.
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Garmin has been doing this for years with their bike computers.
I'm so glad Apple is finally catching up to the technology of half a decade ago.
A bike computer is not a watch.
If you want the feature in a watch, Garmin also has watches with the feature:
https://www.pocket-lint.com/sm... [pocket-lint.com]
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Garmin has been doing this for years with their bike computers.
How does the Garmin help you when you fall off a ladder?
Do all Garmin bike computers allow you to do that or do you have to pay more for a cellular model (the Apple Watch without cellular can still alert 911 through your phone connection).
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https://support.garmin.c [garmin.com]
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Garmin has been doing this for years with their bike computers.
I'm so glad Apple is finally catching up to the technology of half a decade ago.
You're not always on your bike. You are much more likely to be wearing your watch.
Reliable? (Score:2)
Very interesting. I would like to hear what experience the emergency services have with these alerts. Are there many false positives and how do they get the message.
(The linked webpage says access denied)
Probably not many false positives (Score:2)
Are there many false positives and how do they get the message.
It would be interesting to hear if others have seen false positives, but after detecting a fall the Apple Watch alerts you with vibration and noise, and gives you a good minute or so before it ends out alerts.
On top of that once it starts signaling for help it lets you know that, so you could easily dial 911 yourself and say there was not a real emergency.
I am also curious exactly what they get, but I seem to remember it's kind of a recorded mes
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Are there many false positives and how do they get the message.
It would be interesting to hear if others have seen false positives, but after detecting a fall the Apple Watch alerts you with vibration and noise, and gives you a good minute or so before it ends out alerts.
On top of that once it starts signaling for help it lets you know that, so you could easily dial 911 yourself and say there was not a real emergency.
I am also curious exactly what they get, but I seem to remember it's kind of a recorded message, I think it also shares location with 911 services. I would like to see something written about that as well, it could be a cool article.
Just DDG something like "Apple Watch saving life stories", and you will see lots of examples.
Here's another article on the incident reported in TFA:
https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/21... [9to5mac.com]
MANY False Positives (Score:1)
You need to be VERY attentive to your watch if you choose to use this feature. It triggers pretty easily if you are doing certain activities like snowboarding or mountain biking aggressively. If it triggers, you only get 30 seconds to cancel 911. It COULD be a great feature, but it also generates false 911 calls. Our rescue team has received these false calls from people wearing them while skiing. Here is a news story from KS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Newer Garmin and Samsung watches have this abili
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My Apple Watch has gone into Emergency mode several times when I was just digging into my pockets trying to fish out a key or something. And, yes, it does vibrate, and apparently it shows a message, but the message is tiny, far too small for me to read it without reading glasses. (Apple products are evidently designed by near-sighted 20-year-olds.)
Wait (Score:1)
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Being knocked unconscious is worth medical attention and untreated concussion can kill. So it's not an entirely spurious claim.
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Being knocked unconscious is worth medical attention ....
True.
... and untreated concussion can kill.
Also true, but in this case: "clear X-Rays and CT scan", so apparently the hospital visit didn't save his life, it just confirmed that he didn't need medical attention.
I also wondered about this: "... hit his head, knocking him unconscious". Was he wearing a helmet? If not, why not? If he was wearing a helmet, didn't it save his life?
yet another slashvertisment. (Score:2)
Not new, Google Timeline saved a life in 2016 (Score:2)
In 2016, in France, Google's geolocation history saved a biker's life:
https://www.numerama.com/tech/... [numerama.com]
The biker had an accident, but the police was unable to find him (the geolocation provided by the phone company was too imprecise).
His family checked his Google Timeline ( https://www.google.com/maps/ti... [google.com] ) and was able to get the correct position of the biker.
The moral of this story is that Google knows very precisely where you are when you use the phone's GPS.
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The surveillance state is good for you!
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You can turn that feature, location tracking, off or on. I intentionally turn it on and leave it on for myself and all family members.
Did it really save his life? (Score:1)
And now "Dad is doing great, clear X-Rays and CT scan, but a little sore for sure!"
So would he have died, had he had no apple watch? Maybe the title should be 'Apple would have saved biker's life, had he been seriously injured'
Probably overstating the life-saving aspect (Score:2)
Ther real headline (Score:1)
Biker stupid enough to bike alone in isolated area gets lucky.