LivWell Spotlight: Your Apple Watch can save your life if you fall

Our LivWell Spotlight series focuses on how health and technology overlap, covering ways to improve wellness with the right tools.

Your Apple Watch can help save your life if you fall. There’s a setting called ‘Fall Detection’ where if you have a hard fall your phone will call the police for you.

Here’s how to change the setting and what else you need to know. P.S. This page may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure for more information.

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Fall detection is something you must enable. In order to do so, use the Watch app on your phone and navigate to Emergency SOS:

If you look at the image above you’ll see the option for Fall Detection. You can choose to have it on all the time or only during a workout.

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Once you set your choice this will appear: “Fall Detection is designed to recognize falls that happen as you get older. The more physically active you are, the more likely you are to trigger Fall Detection due to high impact activity that can appear to be a fall.”

So be sure you’re ready to turn off Fall Detection if it comes up and you don’t actually need it.

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According to Apple, the way it works is if the watch “detects a hard fall while you’re wearing your watch, it taps you on the wrist, sounds an alarm, and displays an alert. You can choose to contact emergency services or dismiss the alert by pressing the Digital Crown, tapping Close in the upper-left corner, or tapping “I’m OK.”

You need an Apple Watch Series 4 or later to have this feature available.