Emergency SOS, a tremendously helpful feature in iOS and watchOS that allows you to quickly and easily place a potentially life-saving call to local emergency services, is apparently causing some unforeseen problems for people who sleep with their Apple Watch on.
First and foremost, why would anyone sleep with their watch on?
Well, if you happen to own an Apple Watch and use it for tracking your health and fitness metrics, chances are you use apps like HeartWatch and others to keep tabs on your sleeping heart rate, which is a simple but effective measure of your current physical state.
The Verge’s Russell Brandon points us to a bunch of Twitter posts complaining about accidentally activating Emergency SOS if you sleep on your Apple Watch the wrong way.
Jason Rowley tweeted about how he accidentally triggered Emergency SOS in sleep by holding down the Digital Crown button. The police showed up in his bedroom at 1am but were thankfully helpful because they’re apparently accustomed to watchOS misdials like this one.
Public service announcement: If you sleep with an Apple Watch on, consider turning off the Emergency SOS feature, or you too may wake up to 3 cops in your bedroom at 1 AM.
“If you sleep with an Apple Watch on, consider turning off the Emergency SOS feature or you too may wake up to three cops in your bedroom at 1am,” he tweeted out.
That’s because Emergency SOS defaults to automatically calling your local emergency number when you press the Side button five times in a quick succession.
Dubbed Auto Call, this setting requires that you press the Side button five times to bring up the shut down screen, then slide across the Emergency SOS slider to place a 911 call.
If you sleep with your watch on and tend to mistakenly trigger a 911 call while asleep, you may want to disable Auto Call in Settings → Emergency SOS to bring back an additional slider step.
I sleep with my watch on but have never experiences this problem because Auto Call is disabled on my devices. I’ll turn it on and see how it goes…
How about you?

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