Available with iOS 10.2, the “SOS Emergencies” feature allows you to call 112 by quickly pressing the power button 5 times
A few days ago some British media reported the news of a 4-year-old boy who managed to save his mother by calling for help through Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. The little boy had used his parent’s finger to unlock the iPhone’s biometric reader.
In an effort to further speed up the distress call, the Cupertino-based company, while updating iOS to version 10.2, introduced SOS Emergencies, a feature that allows you to send a distress call by clicking the iPhone’s access button quickly five times. First launched in India, the feature is now available in 13 other countries, including Italy. How does it work? Once activated, SOS Emergencies triggers a three-second countdown on the smartphone, which will be accompanied by a beep, at the end of which the feature will call the national emergency number.
How to activate SOS Emergencies
Now let’s see how to activate SOS Emergencies on your iPhone. First of all, to configure the emergency feature on the Apple device you need to first enter “Settings”, then “General” and finally click on “SOS Emergencies”. Here we’ll just have to enable the feature, checking the first item. If we want the emergency number – which in Italy and in many European countries is 112 – to be called silently, i.e. without the smartphone emitting any beep during the countdown, just disable the sound by staying in “General” and “SOS Emergencies”.
How to add a list of contacts to alert
The iOS 10.2 feature also allows you to add a list of people to contact when you activate SOS Emergencies. Users who have launched the distress will also be able to share their location with the chosen contacts as well. In order to use the feature here as well, you need to enable it first. To do this, you have to go once again to “General” and then to “SOS Emergencies”. At this point we’ll have to click on “Health” and then on “Medical records”. Here we have to click on “Add emergency contact”.
To activate location sharing, click on “General” and then on “Privacy”. From here we have to select “Location”, click on “System Services” and finally on “SOS Emergency”.
If you are afraid of launching the distress call by mistake, inadvertently pressing the power button 5 times, the SOS Emergency feature can be easily disabled. Just go to “General”, click on “SOS Emergencies” and disable the automatic call for the power button.