You’ll likely want to enable this clever feature.
Android has added a potentially life-changing feature to its latest update.
Google has teamed up with intelligent safety platform RapidSOS, meaning you can share medical information and emergency contacts with first responders when they need it.
This can happen automatically, all through your phone. Essentially, this means that if you’re unable to communicate with 911, information that might help them treat you is readily available.
Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty
It comes as part of Android’s Emergency Location Service (ELS), which was created to ‘quickly send more accurate location and, in some regions, contextual information to emergency services when a user calls or texts an emergency number’.
That service is already powered by RapidSOS, and in a blog post the company said: “We are expanding our support for Android ELS to allow emergency responders using RapidSOS to get critical medical info and emergency contact data sent directly from Android devices.
“Depending on what users share, this information may include caller name, allergies, medications, preexisting conditions, emergency contacts, and more.”
To make sure this service is available for you, you’ll need to be in America and have Android 12 or later installed. If you don’t want it, no need to fret – you need to manually opt in to have access to it.
If you did want this new, potentially life-saving update, head to the Personal Safety app – which is automatically downloaded on newer Pixel devices – if you have anything older than the Pixel 4a, you’ll have to download it yourself. If you have a Samsung device, have a look and see if you can download the Google Personal Safety app.