I am very happy I bought my Apple Watch for my birthday especially with my recent falls. Apple Watch here I come. The fall detection was one of the main features that made me decide to purchase the watch, although I love it for many other reasons. So I’ve had a few falls now and not once did my watch register the fall.

The first fall that happened was right before my watch tutorial with Apple support. When nothing happened I was able to ask the support team. We verified I had the settings correct, which I did. They said that the fall might not have been hard enough. I thought it was possible since that fall wasn’t a bad fall and kind of let it go. My next fall was more of a slide not a fall so again nothing registered. My fall this weekend was a big slam down fall Oops I did it again and once again the watch showed nothing. Not a very good sign when it was a main feature you purchased the watch for. Especially when a friend is telling you her detection went off when she was banging on a jar.

The thought of calling Apple Support to figure out what is wrong was not an activity I was looking forward to. I knew the settings were correct because we went over that in the tutorial. So something was wrong with my watch. Great!!!

Before I called I had a thought. I set the watch to wheelchair because I’m usually in my chair. Could that be possibly why it isn’t detecting a fall? Makes sense, people in wheelchairs don’t normally fall out of the chair unless you are like me and still hobble around. I do still use my walker some and I do get out of the chair. Could this be the issue. So I tested it. I turned off wheelchair under the health icon and banged my wrist with the watch to simulate a fall. Sure enough I got the fall detection message asking if I fell.

That was it. You cannot have wheelchair settings on for the fall detection to work.  Easy Peasy watch fixed, lesson learned. No big deal because wheelchair setting only effected the activity app for rolling every hour instead of standing. Since I have an electric wheelchair I was faking the rolling with hand motions. Now I’m faking walking with the hand motions.