For a couple of days I have been thinking about how Smartphone can understand our behavior and respond accordingly.

There’s this awesome new app by Google, Google Now, which is like an intelligent personal assistant. It’s so amazing that popular science magazine named it as the Innovation of the year 2012. The app keeps track of what you do (Google knows a lot of stuff about you) and tells you what you should do next. 

Today, I learned that shaking your iPhone hard (inside the new Google Maps app) comes up with Google maps feedback dialog. The feature probably makes use of accelerometer on the iPhone.

This got me into thinking that iOS could probably use this feature for an emergency call. If you try shaking the iPhone, you’d realize that for the f/b dialog to pop up it needs a real hard shake. Something that would occur in case of a fall, where a user might need help and emergency call service. Now I understand that many use their iPhone’s while running, cycling which might confuse the OS for a jerk and produce an unnecessary alert dialog. Here’s where the accelerometer’s awesome capability comes in. An accelerometer on your iPhone can calculate the speed of the movement of your iPhone.

Now, when you run or cycle and need to stop, your speed does not jump directly to zero but rather decreases gradually. However, in case you are in an accident or lets say fall while running/cycle your speed goes down to zero suddenly causing a jerk, which the iPhone would be able to calculate and classify this as a probable emergency situation and pop up an alert dialog to make an emergency call.

I am not that sure whether this is realistic but I can imagine this feature could be super useful.