Important safety features on iPhone that you might not know about. These four iPhone safety features are handy to know about and use, it could make all the difference in an emergency situation for you or your loved ones.
Recently the son of a friend of mine was in a car accident. She had her phone on silent whilst sleeping and nearly missed the his phone call. Luckily the phone vibrating was enough to wake her. I told her about Emergency Bypass feature on the iPhone and she had never heard of it. This is a great safety feature on iPhone that we use now my own kids are older and our parents are older too. We want to make sure they can contact us at any time of night. I feel it is important to share this information about this feature and some other helpful ones, just in case someone doesn’t know of them. You never know, it could actually save someone’s life one day. Read on for four helpful safety features on iPhone that you may or may not know about.
Emergency Bypass
There are particular people that you may want to make sure can contact you at any time of day or night. These people might be elderly or sick relatives, or your teenage or young adult children. We all like to put our phones onto silent or Do Not Disturb now and again for a number of reasons but in an emergency situation you would not want to miss a call from your loved ones. Enabling Emergency Bypass on your phone for certain contacts means that the call will come through from them loudly even when your phone is on silent or DND mode.
How to enable the Emergency Bypass feature on your phone for certain contacts:
- Go to Contacts.
- Select the contact you want and then hit Edit.
- Select Ringtone (and/or Text Tone if you want texts to come through).
- Slide the Emergency Bypass button to on.
Medical ID
The Medical ID feature enables someone to access important information about you during an emergency situation even though your phone is locked. This could be lifesaving if you are unconscious or unable to communicate. Medical personnel and first responders can access important medical information and also contact details for your emergency contacts.
How to enable Medical ID on your iPhone:
- Go to Settings
- Select Health
- Select Medical ID
- Hit Edit and fill in all relevant details that medical personnel might need
- Scroll down to Emergency Contacts and add the contact details for who you would want contacted in an emergency
- Scroll down further to Emergency Access and slide the Show When Locked button to on
Emergency SOS
This feature when activated enables you to very quickly call Emergency Services in the country you are in. Which would be 000 here in Australia. To call Emergency Services all you need to do is rapidly press the side button five times. This will bring a screen where you can drag a slider across to call 000 or a button to hit cancel. If you do nothing, the phone initiates a count-down and automatically calls Emergency when it reaches the end of the countdown. After the call is finished the iPhone also sends a text to your Emergency contacts with your current location.
How to enable the Emergency SOS feature on your iPhone:
- Go to Settings
- Select Emergency SOS
- Slide the Call with Side Button to on.
Share Location via Messages
It can be handy to share your location with others at certain times. Did you know that you can share your location via the Messages app? You can share your location indefinitely, for an hour or until the end of the day. Think how handy it would be if you’re meeting a friend out and they can’t find the restaurant. Or perhaps you or your friend has a date with someone they don’t know very well. They can share their location with you for the rest of the evening, just as a safety precaution.
How to share your location via Messages:
- Go to Messages
- Open the message thread with the person you want to share your location with
- Tap their name up the top of the thread
- Hit info
- Tap Share My Location
- Select how long you wish to share your location for
Whilst there are apps like Find My Friends and Find My Iphone (works for family members in your Apple Family Sharing Group) using location sharing via messages is handy if you don’t have those apps enabled.
USE A CODEWORD FOR TRICKY SITUATIONS
Now this isn’t a safety feature of iPhone but one handy thing I started doing with my kids once they hit their teen years is to use an innocuous sounding word as a codeword. My kids and I have a codeword for the times where they might be out and in a situation where they don’t want to explain why but just want to be picked up. They just text our codeword Liquorice and we go pick them up straight away. Other kids may look over their shoulder, so if they feel like they can’t text the words “I don’t want to be here” they can say, “I feel like eating Liquorice” and we will know they want to be collected.
What is a handy iPhone feature you know about?
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