Shifting Responsibility to The Commons: New Apple Watch Feature Summons Emergency Services If You Fall and Stay Down for Over A Minute
New Apple Watch Series 4 Feature Summons Emergency Services If You Fall and Stay Down for Over A Minute.
At the Apple Event Keynote for 2018, Apple introduced the new Apple Watch Series 4. Amongst its many features is the ability to summon “emergency services” if the watch wearer falls and remains on the ground for over a minute.
I’d like to take a moment to discuss this feature in the context of community services, and to question whether or not Apple has thought this through.
Spoiler: it seems that it hasn’t.
As with any innovation or automated feature, it sounds great when it’s advertised, and this feature is no exception. From a business perspective, it expands the range of Apple Watch wearers to the differently abled, seniors, the very elderly, and others who might be vertically challenged, as well as to those in danger of stroke, epilepsy, heart issues, or other health problems that put them at risk for falling and being unable to revive themselves. Some of these people may not be Apple customers, but their children and other family members may be, which both adds to the social complexity and ethics of the Apple Watch and provides Apple an expanded market as Apple Watch customers purchase them for their loved ones. This gives those who purchase Apple Watches, and those who wear them, a sense of ‘peace of mind,’ in that help will come to them, should they fall. This is big. This sells.
To expand upon this, it is a great business case for Apple to leverage the Commons for their own benefit. Apple can release a feature, that they do not have the infrastructure to support, and the public trust, each emergency services Commons worldwide, without knowing who in their community has watches so they can prepare to support this feature, is on the hook, tactically, financially, and practically, for realizing and fulfilling each call from each Apple Watch for response. In 2017, Apple sold 18 million Apple Watches worldwide.
However, those sales and this new feature translate into real impact on communities worldwide, too. With this feature, if people fell, passed out, flopped down on a bed, fell asleep ,or were rehearsing a dance routine involving a sudden drop, the Apple Watch will summon emergency services, who have to respond by law. Furthermore, emergency services, which are not usually billed by the community (but sometimes are in some districts), would be overtaxed, lifesaving in the contexts where the Apple Watch owner’s fall was truly a medical emergency, but potentially diverting from real emergencies requiring their services. In some cases, private ambulances would be called, costing a small fortune to those insured, and an astronomical sum to those who aren’t.
The concept here is a noble one, and the details of this from a logistics standpoint, have clearly not been fully considered. In some ways, this feature seems a “natural” progression from automotive assistants that dial emergency services when there has been a crash. The difference is that humans aren’t cars, and there are many more ways we can simulate a crash that isn’t a crash, than a car can. Thus, the main problem here is the automation, and the duration it waits to take action. A minute in an emergency, a true emergency, is a long enough time, but what other data is Apple collecting to measure that it is a true emergency? How does Apple know that the data that they have collected via the watch for one person to indicate trouble, is the same metric for someone else? The unknowns of the algorithm here are just too varied to enable trust and security, and the potential violation of privacy looms as well.
Apple could do something smart with this, adapting it for local networks like nursing homes or rehabilitation centers, where a person within the facility could be the “emergency response,’ but out in the broader Commons, it is more complex. Unless Apple is purchasing fleets of ambulances and hiring official Apple EMT’s to respond to these calls, it appears that just like others before them, they are looking to leverage community services in the long term for profit in the short term. Thus, the reality of this being implemented successfully in the Commons is less probable. However, depending on laws for tracking individuals, small private local usage could greatly benefit from a feature like this, as long as people could choose whether or not they wanted to participate in adopting the technology in a carefully considered context.
From an ethics and humane standpoint, this Apple Watch feature raises some flags. With it, the Apple Watch becomes a type of “caregiver, babysitter, security guard, and/or custodian” of people who live alone — a first stab at a technical solution to a social problem: our lack of structure as a society to provide adequate social engagement and community, enough so that we know our neighbors, and that they will look out for us, as we will look out for them. Apple is designing a feature that co-ops the need to engage with other humans in our local locale, and to build longstanding relationships with them, creating a dynamic to satisfy sociability digitally, so that the Apple Watch wearer’s social relationships will first be with the Apple Watch and with Siri, and less so with their loved ones, who may not want a social relationship with them any more, or have less time for these relationships, and thus bought the Apple Watch as a replacement for human caring.
When we forfeit our community cooperation to the network, we shift it to a limited and more rigid framework for decisions, judgement, actions, and choices from all available options (human agency), than we have when we are relating to each other outside of that framework. The more these become compounded between various apps, devices, and features, the more restricted our options will become.
