The promised fall detection of the Pixel Watch finally launches

With the launch of the Pixel Watch in October, Google began to slowly try to get back to smartwatch relevance. A few months later, the company is launching a big feature that has been on the Apple Watch for four years now: fall detection.

As Google describes the feature, “Fall detection uses the motion sensors built into your watch and machine learning on your device to determine if you’ve taken a hard fall and call emergency services if you don’t move or respond for a certain amount of time. period of time..» As with Apple Watch, when a fall is detected, you will receive a full-screen pop-up window asking if everything is fine with you. If you don’t answer, an alarm will sound for the next minute, and if you still don’t answer, the watch will call 911. Fall detection has been a major reason why people at risk, such as the elderly, wear the Apple Watch, so it’s good that Google is finally providing this feature.

The Apple Watch version, along with car crash detection, resulted in some false positives, with the watch dialing 911 when users were uninjured. Google says it has been working to stop this, saying, “Worried about burpees or skiing causing an accidental 911 call? little hitch thanks to our machine learning algorithms and thorough testing.” Google lists skiing, burpees, jumping, and swimming as activities that can lead to false positives, but hopefully it has ironed out the bugs through its “rigorous”testing process.

Fall detection is enabled, so a 911 call will never happen unless you specifically enable it. Google says, “You can enable this feature from the Updates page in the Watch Companion app, or directly on your Pixel Watch from the Personal Safety app. If your Pixel Watch doesn’t have LTE, your phone must be nearby to make a call.