Report: iPhone, Apple Watch to Get Car Crash Detection Feature

911 would be dialed automatically if a crash was detected by your Apple device.

Apple is always keen to add health and safety features to its devices, and it looks as though car accident detection could be the next one rolled out.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, documents reviewed by the newspaper and people familiar with the feature have revealed a "crash detection" system for iPhones and Apple Watches. Either device would gain the ability to detect when a car accident occurs and react to it by automatically dialing 911, potentially saving lives.

The detection would rely on data collected from the sensors contained in both Apple's smartphones and smartwatches. In order for it to be reliable, Apple's engineers must have discovered a way to accurately detect a car accident from motion sensing data, most likely from the accelerometer. A sudden spike in gravity forces is one example given as a way of detecting such an accident.

Apple has apparently been testing the feature for a year using data collected anonymously from iPhone and Apple Watch users. Over 10 million vehicle impacts have been detected this way, 50,000 of which resulted in a call to 911. The information from the impacts and emergency call is fed back into the crash detection system to improve its accuracy.

It's unclear when exactly Apple will introduce the new detection feature, but it's expected to be next year. The company may wait until the launch of the iPhone 14, but a lot will depend on how reliable the system already is in testing and how many existing generations of iPhone and Apple Watch it's capable of working with.

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