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Stunt Woman Tests Apple Watch With Violent Fake Falls (hothardware.com)
It seems like everyone's curious about how the Apple Watch 4 detects falls. The Washington Post reports:
In the interest of science, I've tried jumping off ledges and throwing myself onto furniture. The thing never went off. (The feature is on by default only for people older than 65, but I turned mine on.) It's possible, even likely, that the Watch could tell I was faking.
What's important is actual falls, not stunts. Apple says it studied the falls of 2,500 people of varying ages. Yet the company hasn't said how often it catches real falls or sets off false alarms. This isn't like claiming the "best camera ever" on a smartphone -- if Apple wants us to think of its products as life aids, it ought to show us the data. Even better: peer-reviewed studies. Apple's disclaimer says: "Apple Watch cannot detect all falls. The more physically active you are, the more likely you are to trigger Fall Detection due to high impact activity that can appear to be a fall."
But there's now also a new video by the Wall Street Journal that tests the watch's fall-detecting capabilities with a professional stuntwoman. Hot Hardware reports: The Wall Street Journal found that the Apple Watch did a very good job of detecting a serious fall while ignoring insignificant or outright fake falls. The stunt double performed a series of falls that are similar to falls in the slides that Apple showed in its keynote explaining the feature. In the testing, the watch was able to identify those falls and offer to call emergency services.
The most interesting part is that even though the stunt woman pulled some serious fake falls, complete with Hollywood-style tumbling down a hill, the Apple Watch was able to figure out if the fall was fake and didn't offer to call emergency services.
The Journal's reporter credits the watch's gyroscope and accelerometer, which can monitor numerous factors including both speed and wrist trajectory. Their conclusion?
"Turns out the Apple Watch really does know when you're just playing around."
What's important is actual falls, not stunts. Apple says it studied the falls of 2,500 people of varying ages. Yet the company hasn't said how often it catches real falls or sets off false alarms. This isn't like claiming the "best camera ever" on a smartphone -- if Apple wants us to think of its products as life aids, it ought to show us the data. Even better: peer-reviewed studies. Apple's disclaimer says: "Apple Watch cannot detect all falls. The more physically active you are, the more likely you are to trigger Fall Detection due to high impact activity that can appear to be a fall."
But there's now also a new video by the Wall Street Journal that tests the watch's fall-detecting capabilities with a professional stuntwoman. Hot Hardware reports: The Wall Street Journal found that the Apple Watch did a very good job of detecting a serious fall while ignoring insignificant or outright fake falls. The stunt double performed a series of falls that are similar to falls in the slides that Apple showed in its keynote explaining the feature. In the testing, the watch was able to identify those falls and offer to call emergency services.
The most interesting part is that even though the stunt woman pulled some serious fake falls, complete with Hollywood-style tumbling down a hill, the Apple Watch was able to figure out if the fall was fake and didn't offer to call emergency services.
The Journal's reporter credits the watch's gyroscope and accelerometer, which can monitor numerous factors including both speed and wrist trajectory. Their conclusion?
"Turns out the Apple Watch really does know when you're just playing around."
It probably can tell real falls from fake ones by measuring rapid decelleration. In a real fall you would usually come to a stopped state almost instantaneously while in a fake fall you would absorb some of the impact by cushioning the impact (slowing the decelleration) with your arms and legs. If this is right then this watch wouldn't detect someone falling off a roof and getting impaled on fence.
Niagra Falls?
Slowly I turned...
Step By Step...
Inch By Inch...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
That video was just an advertisement, it praised all the features, including: "the battery life has been solid, lasting a day and a half" !
And it claims this is a good investment for older people who need fall detection, just because the $400 device did detect a falls they tried. Will the older people remember to charge it every night? How will it detect their falls when they go to the toilet during the night charging time? At the same time there are specialized fall detectors for the elderly, how about doing a comparison?
Many Apple slashvertisements lately...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
How can I get a job tipping over old people?
Have gnu, will travel.
The whole point of a stunt fall is to look like a real fall but not produce the kinds of impacts that'd result in injury. It makes sense that trying to fake a fall that way would result in the watch deciding it wasn't a real fall. There wouldn't have been, for instance, the kind of sharp, sudden impact you see in a real fall because the stuntperson would be spreading the impact out over time so they wouldn't break bones.
I somehow think it is more likely that it's not very good at recognizing serious falls in the first place.
Unless the stunt woman actually went and caused real serious injury to herself on at least one fall and it *did* correctly identify that as a real fall, then I'm more inclined to think that this is feature that doesn't work as well as they might advertise it to.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't know why I'm seeing this story, since I have Ad-Block turned on.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. An Apple Watch may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. An Apple Watch must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. An Apple Watch must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
#DeleteChrome
My mother broke her hip a few years ago by tripping over the edge of a chair and landing on tile, trying to get to her phone on the kitchen counter. She would've had to crawl, with a broken hip and various smaller injuries, some forty feet to the kitchen, remember exactly where her phone was, and somehow reach the top of the counter. Conscious, but in severe pain and unable to reach her phone. (And what actually came in handy was shouting at Alexa to call me.)
Look it's going to detect some real false and it's going to have a false positive rate and a missed-true rate. no matter what. so what ecaxly are we discussing here. Joanna Stern at the WSJ dod the exact same thematic test with a stunt person and came to the exact oppostie conclusion.
Bottom line is a senior citizen who lives alone is better off with this than without it. Anyone disagree?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As in martial arts, stunt people learn how to go to the ground while minimizing the impact on their body.
So a fake fall is quite different from a natural fall, even if it looks for the audience the same (or similar).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Iâ(TM)ve had mine for a couple of weeks. Iâ(TM)ve had one false fall detection happen when I was using my fist to literally hammer together an IKEA style bookshelf. The high G impact was enough. Iâ(TM)ve had one real detection when I went down hard riding my mountain bike. In both cases it alerted and asked if I needed help. BTW: Iâ(TM)m seeing two solid days of battery life even when using GPS and heart rate monitoring for multiple hour rides.
Okay, this is a bunch of bullshit.
My wife has an Apple Watch. Its detection algorithms are extremely inconsistent: it frequently doesn't detect that she's exercising or her heart rate. It frequently doesn't detect that she has raised her wrist. Etc.
The actual title of this article should be: "Apple Watch Cannot Reliably Detect Falls." Because that's the far simpler explanation: not that it has some fancy algorithmically-generated profiles for "real falls" vs. "fake falls," but that it has one profile for "falls" that is unreliable.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Our insurance company sent my wife one of those devices at no cost following her heart mitral valve replacement and hip replacement. It turned out to be touchy and temperamental. She'd just set it down on the coffee table and it would trigger dial the company. The service person had to go through a script before they'd hang up. While hanging around her neck it would swing back and forth and eventually bang against her sternum, setting it off. She averaged 3 to 5 false triggers per day. On the only day she could have used it we were walking to the stadium to watch our grandson play baseball. We went single file through a gap in the curb and I heard a thud behind me. She had fallen face first flat onto the concrete. The device didn't trigger. I drove her to the doctor and she got a 1.5" cut sewed up. Her face was black and blue for months because she was on blood thinner. We boxed the device up and sent it back. Fortunately, it didn't cost us anything.
I suspect that the Series 4 Apple Watch would behave the same way.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!