The thought occurred to me the other day: what if you’re in an accident and your phone’s screen breaks? What if you fall and can’t move; you have your phone and it’s charged but the screen won’t respond? Older phones with keypads could probably still call with broken screens, but with touchscreen technology becoming prevalent and keypads disappearing, what needs to be done?
My idea is this: One single hardware button can make a call to a number you set up. By default it’s 911, but it’s adjustable. Maybe on the iPhone it could be a home-button tap pattern. On Androids where the screen contains the buttons now, maybe it could be a combination of volume rockers and the power button. Easy to do on purpose but hard to do by accident.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Siri and Google’s voice recognition. Yes, you can tell it to call emergency services. But what if you’re out of data range? What if you don’t have your backup phone with you?
Really though this is more of a firmware thing, especially for Apple. I think it could be part of a future iOS release and could be backported to older phones.
I don’t know. To me it just seems like an oversight.
