The past 20 years have been of crucial importance in cementing Apple’s spot as an industry leader in the realm of consumer electronics. Odds are you can’t spend a single day without coming across an iPhone or MacBook, that in itself should be sufficient to assess Apple’s reach. Greatly contributing to Apple’s success is its willingness to constantly innovate and implement new features into its products.
Such is the case with the newly released iPhone 14, as the addition of an improved 3-axis gyroscope and accelerometer allowed for the development of a car crash detection system (Humphries 2022). This new feature is meant to detect when the owner of the phone is involved in an accident and automatically contact first responders thereafter. Its implementation was praised as people started picturing the number of lives that this technology could save, yet things did not exactly go as planned.
A few weeks after the release of the iPhone 14, dispatchers across the world started receiving calls from unaware people casually going about their day. It was then that the calls were traced back to the newly implemented crash detection system, one that appeared to mistake a variety of scenarios for traffic accidents. A 911 dispatch center near Kings Island amusement park even reported receiving up to 6 calls in a single day from unaware people riding rollercoasters.
Apple has been quick to address the issue and advise users on how to tweak settings to avoid this unfortunate occurrence from taking place. After a careful analysis technicians were also able to trace the issue back to the software around which the detection functionality was built, meaning a simple software update should be able to take care of the issue.
In light of this issue, Apple has dealt with scrutiny concerning the number of testing hours involved in the implementation of new features, however full cooperation in a small-scale investigation was offered and no wrongdoing was found.
We are to see in the coming months if the American company will be able to develop an appropriate update or if the feature will have to be scrapped entirely. What we can gather is that this incident, pun intended, is that a simple hiccup won’t stop Apple on its path to innovation.
References
Mathew Humphfries (2022), Iphone 14 Crash Detection Calls 911 on Roller Coasters, [online] , accessed 10/10/2022, https://www.pcmag.com/news/iphone-14-crash-detection-calls-911-on-roller-coasters
Emma Roth (2022), The Iphone 14 Keeps calling 911 on Rollercoasters, [online] , accessed 11/10/2022, https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/9/23395222/iphone-14-calling-911-rollercoasters-apple-crash-detection
Apple is very much to blame for the fact that this function failed. Apple has major capacity to ensure that a new function like this is tested appropriately before launching in to the world. Especially a function related to calling emergency centers. The centers have thereby less time to help the actual emergency cases. Thus for the future, Apple must ensure that the function will work, by testing it considerably, or indeed exclude the function entirely.
When the iPhone 14 was announced and I saw this crash detection introduced for the first time I was actually wondering how they would be able to distinguish certain events from crashes. I quickly forgot about it afterwards and didn’t pay any attention to it, but the fact that this is causing problems for emergency services is very worrying. I agree with you that one would expect a company with the resource availability that Apple has would make sure that incidents like this don’t happen on such scales. I’m interested to see if Apple can fix the feature in time or that they will have to disable the feature for the time being. Thanks for sharing!