How To Prepare Your iPhone For An Emergency

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you what you need to do to prepare your iPhone so it can help you in an emergency.

Your iPhone can really help you in an emergency but only if you take the steps first to set things up. First, let's take a look at Medical ID. I want to show you it in action first so you can see why this is important. Here I am on the lock screen for my iPhone. I'm going to try to unlock it. When I do it's not going to unlock. Why? Because it's not me trying to unlock my iPhone. It's somebody trying to help me. I have a problem and they want to try to help me. So they've grabbed my iPhone. People like paramedics and others in situations to help you know they can go to your iPhone to get information that will let them help you. So what they're going to do is they're going to try to unlock it by just swiping up from the bottom, for instance. But Face ID won't work for them. They'll get to the lock screen and there they'll find the Emergency Button. You see it here at the bottom left. If they tap that it's going to allow them to make an emergency phone call with your phone which they probably don't need because they have their own phone. But they're also going to see down here Medical ID and they can tap that and get information about you. Now, I haven't set anything up so it just shows my name. Let's change that. 

To setup your Medical ID you don't do it in Settings. Instead you go to the Health App. Go into there and look at the top where the icon that represents you. If you don't see it you may need to scroll down, and you may need to scroll back up so you see it at the top right corner. Tap on that. The second item you'll see here is Medical ID. Go into there. Now, we're going to set some things up here. First, we want to make sure that Emergency Access is shown when locked. We want to make sure that Share During Emergency Call is On. So if you call emergency first responders they'll get some of this information. You can find out more about what they get right here. 

Now you want to set these things up. So you may want to go and Edit, for instance, your Name, add a date of birth, add your primary language. Then you could go down here and fill some of this other stuff out. For instance, you can add your medications here. Important things to know. You can add allergies here as well. Then emergency contacts. Tap Add there and add an emergency contact. This is probably the most important thing here. Go ahead and add an emergency contact, indicate how they are related to you, and continue to add more emergency contacts if you like. You can add other medical conditions here, additional information, and notes. 

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So now you can see everything I've added here. I've added a photo, some medications, allergies, emergency contacts (two of them). Under conditions I've just typed some text here. Under Additional Information, you can add your height, weight, and blood type. You can add additional notes here. So with all that in place let's try again unlocking my iPhone here. But Face ID won't work. So instead I will tap Emergency and then Medical ID. Now you'll see all this information comes up here. A lot of good useful information for somebody to be able to help me. Most first responders know to look for this emergency medical information on your phone if they can't get it directly from you. 

Now another thing you should do is prepare the SOS feature on your iPhone so you can use it in an emergency. To do that you do want to go into Settings. Scroll down and look for Emergency SOS. Then in here the first thing you want to do is set it up and remember how you have it setup to be able to use this SOS feature. So this allows you to call for help in a quicker and easier way than actually opening up your phone and dialing 911, 999, or whatever it is in your area. 

Now this is a demo phone and doesn't currently have a SIM in it. So you'll see these options grayed out. But you could read about the options you have available here. You can call by pressing the Side Button and one of the Volume Buttons, holding them down until it calls for help. You'll get an alarm and a countdown timer on the screen so you don't have to worry about accidentally triggering these. It would be hard to do.

You can also set it up so you can press the Side Button five times rapidly to trigger the same thing. Further down here, if your phone has this feature, you can have it automatically make the call after a severe crash is detected. . Then here you're going to see your emergency contacts. Notice how those are the same as what I had setup in my Medical ID in the Health App. 

The biggest problem with the SOS feature is not knowing how it works when you need it. You don't want to dig into Settings and read about it in that situation. So you want to turn these On and then pay careful attention to how you trigger it. Think about it in advance. Maybe practice by NOT actually pressing the buttons but right now next to them to try to create a memory that you can rely on in an emergency. Keep in mind that this can also be used by somebody else to get you help if you're unable to do it on your own. So you have to have these turned On for it to work but then they can use your phone and hold down the volume button and the side button and wait for the SOS to trigger or press the side button five times. But it won't work unless you've turned those On in advance and won't contact your emergency contact unless you've added those in advance as well. 

Using the SOS feature will not only contact emergency services in your area, it will also send a message with your location to your emergency contacts. But you have to have set those up first in the Health App. Take a few minutes right now to fill out or update your Medical ID in the Health App and then review your SOS settings in the Settings App. Hope you found this useful. Stay safe. Thanks for watching.