Hi team. Apologies if this has been done to death, lots of discussion of watches and tracking but couldn’t find anything on this specifically:
I have been using Garmins for years (Fenix and Epix) and love them, the tracking and data.
But after resisting for years I am finally considering an Apple watch, purely for its emergency features - I often foil or SUP on my own and sometimes/often in cruddy weather (usually its when the bumps are most fun). Being able to make an SOS call without having to dig out my phone and probably disentangle it an find the right button etc could be difficult. Would be good not to have to lug it along too in waterproof pouch too.
Has anyone had any false alarms with the auto Emergency calls on Falls or crashes? High chance of falls / crashes when the conditions are more extreme!
I think it may depend what apps you are using. I haven’t ever had any issues with false alarms in Waterspeed or SURFR. I recently recorded a session using the apple watch activity tracker (first time using that app to record a water session) and I DID have an emergency alert that popped up after a hard fall. The alert said something like “it looks like youve had a hard fall”. I couldn’t dismiss the alert since the face of the watch was wet (didn’t realize you can just press the crown), but the alert goes away without notifying anyone if you start moving again within a minute (which I did).
After that happened I looked into it a bit further and found this and learned you can also turn fall detection off.
Regarding making calls from the watch - it definitely works, with the caveat that you really can’t hear it. So if I need to call someone and tell them something, I can, but it is very hard to hear any response (impossible with strong wind blowing). I often use voice to text for notifications, and it works well.
Note that the touch sensitivity of the face is really bad when the watch is wet, so keep that in mind. The Apple watch pro has some tactile buttons that the regular watch doesn’t have, which gives it some basic functionality when wet, but a lot of the functionality requires the touchscreen.
I’ve had an apple watch series 7 for a few years now and never had an issue with hard falls initiating auto emergency calls. I do always either have the Dawn Patrol app running (which also turns on the water lock feature), or manually turn on the water lock feature if not using Dawn Patrol. Getting in the water without the water lock being on is what causes a lot of accidental calls to happen.
I agree with @Velocicraptor about it being hard to hear while on a call. Best thing I figured out which helps a bit is to cup your hand around the watch and stick that up to your ear when you expect the person on the other end to be speaking. Helps focus/magnify the sound level a bit and makes hearing things a bit easier.
My understanding (from Apple support) of how the feature works is if it detects a hard fall - which i guess it picks up as rapid deceleration to nil motion - it waits for 60 seconds and then if there is no activity it initiates the call. Usually when you have a hard tumble routine is - shake yourself off…wtf!!..and assorted expletives…then get sorted and going again - which would disable the auto SOS call. It may still throw up the on-watch alert msg in the meantime I guess.
Pretty embarrassing to have the Water Police / Maritime / Sea Rescue turn up to your location if in fact your are totally ok! You can turn the SOS feature off…but its why i want to get the watch in case something crazy does happen on my own, and also to be able to call out more easily than digging a phone out (notwishstanding the comments above about difficulty of use with water and wind noise).