Don’t you think technology has been the greatest gift to mankind? I mean, we now have driverless cars and phones that save our lives. Don’t believe us?
Let us tell you about an astonishing incident wherein an advanced feature of a smartphone was able to save a man involved in an accident, reported The Indian Express. Reddit user Chuck Walker aka u/postnospam shared the entire ordeal on Reddit that gave us severe goosebumps.
According to Chuck, a Bobcat loader (JCB) rolled off an embankment and ended upside down in a ravine with him in it. Stuck in the heavy machinery, he screamed for help after he came back to his senses 8 minutes later. However, his pleas weren’t heard by anyone as the accident occurred deep into his property. With his phone out of sight and “Hey Google” disabled on his Google Pixel 4XL phone, he was completely helpless. Chuck was also terribly injured with 7 ribs and 4 thoracic vertebrae broken.
However, soon he heard a voice coming from the one earbud that managed to stay in place. Apparently, he had enabled the ‘car crash detection’ feature on his Google Pixel phone. Hence, when he met with the accident, the mobile device automatically made a call to the emergency services (911) and alerted them.
The voice he heard on his earbuds was from an emergency dispatcher. Chuck was then able to talk to them on call and within minutes he could hear the rescue team with their equipment approaching the accident site from the fire station that was around 11 minutes from his property.
Google Pixel phones have an inbuilt car-crash detection system that will automatically call emergency services on your behalf if your are in an accident. Also, if you're wondering how we trained the ML models, I'll leave you with an image 😉 https://t.co/toCNAfo8sE pic.twitter.com/LJwceaBWpo
— Dave Burke (@davey_burke) February 23, 2021
And three months later, Chuck is safe and healthy, all thanks to the rescue team, medical experts, and his phone, of course.
Car Crash Detection saved me hours of suffering from pixel_phones
Chuck in his post expressed his eagerness to know how the process works and did the emergency helpline center receive a call from a digital voice? Well, we sure want to know that too.
Cover image: left