The Apple Watch is again being credited with saving a user’s life. As reported by News Corp Australia, Kate Donald suffers from epilepsy, and her Apple Watch alerted family members when she suffered a seizure while home alone, triggering fall detection.
The report explains that Kate’s seizures can be triggered by a lack of sleep. When her husband noticed she wasn’t feeling right, he arranged to have her three kids out of the house so she could catch up on sleep.
While she has home alone, however, Kate suffered a seizure, causing her to fall. Luckily, she was wearing an Apple Watch at the time, which used Emergency SOS to contact emergency services and her husband. Emergency SOS also sent follow-up messages as Kate’s location changed while she was en route to the hospital.
Kate says she bought the Apple Watch when she was pregnant with her youngest child last year, and was suffering from regular falls:
“We thought the watch could be useful for epilepsy and falling down,” Mrs. Donald says. “When I was pregnant with Tilly, I was in hospital and falling a lot. My head was literally covered in bruises.
“We were like, ‘What can we do?’ Do we get a panic alarm like old people have, but you need to be conscious to press the button and I’m not. [The watch] alerted Ben and then he called a neighbor and she called a couple of people in the street because she wasn’t home and they knew the pin code for our home.
“They let themselves in and called an ambulance, but the ambulance was like, ‘Hang on, there’s already someone being dispatched to the address’.”
Fall detection was added to the Apple Watch with last year’s Series 4. The feature works by registering if you suffer a hard fall. If it notices that you are immobile for an entire minute, it will place a call to emergency services and send a text message to your emergency contacts, including your current location.
By default, fall detection is disabled for Apple Watch users under the age of 65. Learn how to enable the feature in our how-to. Read more Apple Watch stories in our Apple Health guide.
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