After activating the Emergency SOS, you will get the option to dial your emergency medical contact or swipe to contact emergency services . Immediately this has happened, you’ll start sharing your current location with your emergency contact and with emergency services even when your location services is turned off. You have to add your Emergency SOS as emergency contacts in your Health app so that it can contact the right people. If not, the Emergency SOS will only dial 911 (or it’s equivalent in your locality).
If you wish to add an emergency contact, just open the Health app and then you select “Medical ID” which is found at the bottom-right, and then you select “Edit“. After doing that, go down to “Emergency Contacts” and then choose “add emergency contact”.
After doing all those, proceed to “Settings” and then “Emergency SOS” for some additional options.
The most essential setting found here is “Auto Call“. With Auto Call feature enabled, your phone will after 3-seconds countdown, dial emergency services by itself. As it does this, it’ll produce a very loud and annoying sound used as alert. This I was able to discover while I was trying to test the feature as early as 5:00 AM by which time my siblings were still sleeping.
Talking about children, if you are in the habit of leaving your mobile phone with your children or anyone who is otherwise inclined to pressing buttons anyhow and maybe by mistake turning on the Emergency SOS feature, then I would strongly recommend that you don’t turn up “Auto Call“.
Presently, there isn’t actually anyway to turn off Emergency SOS on an iPhone, asides disabling Auto Call. If you wish, you can leave Auto Call turned on and disable the countdown sound.
If you have ever used Emergency SOS feature on your iPhone, let us know about it in the comments section.
