New Apple vids show how to enable heart alerts & fall detection for Apple Watch Series 4

Apple on Thursday uploaded a pair of YouTube videos explaining two of the health features of the Apple Watch Series 4, irregular heart rhythm notifications and fall detection.

Both clips are under 40 seconds long, and guide wearers to the right places in the iOS Watch app — "Emergency SOS" in the case of fall detection, and "Heart" for arrhythmia alerts.

Fall detection is normally off by default unless a Watch owner enters their age as 65 or older when they set up a Watch and/or the iOS Health app. This is because Apple's fall algorithms aren't perfect and can potentially be triggered by intense but otherwise normal activity, such as weightlifting.

That can have serious consequences. Emergency SOS will not only sound an alarm but call local emergency services, and message any emergency contacts you've assigned.

The irregular heart notifications can be linked to high and/or low heart rates with specified thresholds. To further avoid false alarms, notifications are only sent if a heart rate holds within a danger zone for 10 minutes.

9 Comments

eightzero 3145 comments · 14 Years

About 5 years ago

AppleInsider said:

Apple on Thursday uploaded a pair of YouTube videos explaining two of the health features of the Apple Watch Series 4, irregular heart rhythm notifications and fall detection.

How do I get this watch face on my new AW4? And the white one in the other ads?

chasm 3590 comments · 10 Years

eightzero said:

How do I get this watch face on my new AW4? And the white one in the other ads?

If you have an Apple Watch Series 4, it’s one of the several default watch faces. You may not recognize it because it may not have all of those complications on the default face. You add complications to any given watch face.

chasm said:

eightzero said:

How do I get this watch face on my new AW4? And the white one in the other ads?

If you have an Apple Watch Series 4, it’s one of the several default watch faces. You may not recognize it because it may not have all of those complications on the default face. You add complications to any given watch face.

It's not there in any form. This appears to be the case with many of the faces Apple uses in its ads.

Reminder to readers outside the US: the Afib detection does not work in all regions. If you’re in one of the (mostly European) countries where the ECG functionality is or was recently made available, you’ve got the Afib detection option (which you turn on using the instructions in this article). If you are in a country that does not have the ECG functionality turned on yet, you do not have Afib detection yet. You can, however, still set high and low heart rate alerts.

Soli 9981 comments · 9 Years

I am well under the default age for automatic Fall Detection but I enabled it anyway. I haven't had a single false alarm, but I have fallen bad enough twice hiking where I assumed it would've gone off but it didn't.

eightzero said:

chasm said:

eightzero said:

How do I get this watch face on my new AW4? And the white one in the other ads?

If you have an Apple Watch Series 4, it’s one of the several default watch faces. You may not recognize it because it may not have all of those complications on the default face. You add complications to any given watch face.

It's not there in any form. This appears to be the case with many of the faces Apple uses in its ads.

It's called Infograph and I've been using it since getting my Series 4 Watch. If you can't find it via the Watch try adding it from the Watch app on your iPhone.