Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to their original Fall Detection feature for Apple Watch and Crash Detection for both Apple Watch and iPhone. Of course we know that now, but at the time of the original patent, Apple's marketing tags weren't available to help us understand the patent in a clearer light. While the original patent focused on "care events" for falling and car crashes, the patent also opened the door to possible future "care events" it may cover.

For instance, a future "care event" could involve  an Apple Watch user involved in a fall due to a "fire" event and convey the relevant information from Apple Watch sensors to the fire department.

Apple's original patent covered systems, methods, and apparatuses for providing alerts regarding a care event. An occurrence of one or more "care events" may be detected by an electronic device monitoring environmental data and/or user data from one or more sensors.

Originally, the patent didn't restrict Fall Detection or a care event to just the Apple Watch. Apple made it clear that their future care detection feature could be found in wearable devices, a smartphone, a tablet and more. In fact, you'll notice in patent FIG. 1 below, that the runner isn't wearing a watch. So this was clearly a business decision to limit Fall Detection to Apple Watch so as to give it a competitive edge over competing watches.

Apple's patent further notes that an electronic device may transmit one or more alerts regarding the detected occurrence to at least one other electronic device. In some cases, the electronic device may cooperate with at least one other electronic device in monitoring, detecting, and/or transmitting. For example, the electronic device may detect the occurrence based on sensor data received from a cooperative electronic device or such data in combination with the electronic device's sensor data. By way of another example, the electronic device may detect the occurrence and signal a cooperative electronic device to transmit one or more alerts.

In some implementations, detection of whether or not a care event has occurred may be dependent upon a context of the electronic device, such as a detected location or speed of travel of the electronic device.

In various implementations, the alerts may be transmitted to electronic devices listed in a care list, which may be user defined. Such a care list may be a data record indicating parties whom should be alerted in case of an occurrence and how they should be alerted, as noted in patent FIG. 8 above.

In some cases, a care list may have multiple levels where an alert for an occurrence is transmitted to a first set of list members and then to a second set of list members if an escalation condition occurs. Further, such a care list may also include conditions specifying different procedures to be followed in transmitting alerts based on factors such as the particular occurrence detected, a context of the electronic device, and so on.

Apple defined "care events" as including "a car crash, a bike accident, a medical emergency such as a heart attack or an aneurysm, separation of a child from the child's caregiver, a dementia patient becoming lost, an avalanche, a fall, a mugging, a fire, and/or any other event for which a user may require specific medical, police, family, fire rescue, and/or other kind of assistance."

By Apple's own definition, there may future additions coming to Apple Watch. For instance, to communicate fire detection to emergency services, Apple would have to include smoke detection sensors and tune their new temperature sensor to relay the heat levels detected around the fallen Apple Watch user. 

The original "Care Event Detection" patent didn't emphasize Fall, Fallen or Fall Detection and so in Apple's patent update, they've added 20 new patent claims wherein the word fall or fallen is mentioned 13 times. Below is just one example:

An electronic device, comprising: a display; a sensor that gathers sensor data; processing circuitry configured to: monitor the sensor data to detect that a user has fallen, and present a prompt on the display in response to detecting that the user has fallen; and communication circuitry that transmits an alert if a response to the prompt is not received.

The new patent claims also adds new references to "motion responses" of the user; motion detection; audio prompts; haptic prompts and more. To review the original patent and it's new patent claims, review patent application  20220284789.

Other past reports relating to fall detection could be found here: 01 and 02. Apple also updated Crash Detection in Apple Watch 8 yesterday and is presented in the video below.