Apple's Find My technology came to the rescue of a California woman whose car went off the side of a hill, pinpointing her location to family members.
Apple's Find My tech helped locate a woman whose car crashed off the side of a hill in San Bernardino, California. Find My is a proprietary Apple feature that's available on most of the company's products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, AirTags, and AirPods. The feature helps people keep track of (and find) their missing devices, but it also has a safety component. Users can share their location in the Find My app to let their friends and family members keep tabs on their whereabouts, and locate them in case of an emergency.
This is precisely the feature that came to the rescue of a woman whose car tumbled off a highway and fell 200 feet down the side of a hill. In a Facebook post (first spotted by AppleInsider), San Bernardino County Fire said it conducted an 'Over The Side' rescue of an adult woman who had sustained serious injuries. The woman was driving home from a family gathering the previous night when her car went off the road. When family members weren't able to contact her the next morning, they used the Find My feature to pinpoint her location. When they reached the spot and found the car wreck, they called 911. Luckily for the victim, the San Bernardino fire department was able to reach her in time and transfer her to an ambulance.
Crews Rescue Driver after Crash This morning, #SBCoFD firefighters were dispatched to a reported traffic collision on... Posted by San Bernardino County Fire on Monday, December 26, 2022
Find My Comes To The Rescue, Again
Find My features on an iPhone
While the extent of the woman's injuries are unknown, enabling Find My and sharing her location with family likely saved her life. This isn't the first time Find My has been in the news. Recently, police in New Hampshire were able to locate car thieves thanks to a pair of AirPods that were left in the car. The car owner tracked his AirPods in the Find My app and alerted the authorities. A similar incident earlier this year helped Formula One driver Sebastian Vettel track down his stolen AirPods.
Outside of Find My, Apple has other life-saving features built into its iPhones. The Emergency SOS via Satellite feature that made its debut on the iPhone 14 series was responsible for saving two people after their car went off the side of a mountain in California. Earlier, the same feature helped to rescue a man stranded in Alaska. Emergency SOS via Satellite enables users to contact emergency services using satellite connectivity when they're in an area without cellular of Wi-Fi coverage. The feature is only available on the iPhone 14 series, and has currently been rolled out in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe.
Even the Apple Watch has been credited with saving many lives, thanks to features like irregular heart rate detection and Fall Detection. However, some Apple safety features don't have a very good track record, such as Crash Detection which debuted with the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Series 8. The feature, which uses a combination of sensors to detect when users have been in a severe car accident and call 911, has a trigger problem on rollercoasters. More recently, Apple's Crash Detection was in the news after skiers' iPhones and Apple Watches sent dozens of false alerts to dispatchers in a Colorado ski town.
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