Prevent Fall Accidents Using Your iPhone

Fall accidents occur more frequently than you might think. Studies show that more than 1 in every 4 senior people suffer a fall each year. Hospital ER’s even get as many as 3 million older people for fall injuries. And those are the only ones that tell their doctors about it. 

Traumatic Brain Injuries or TBI, broken bones, and even hip fractures are some of the most common injuries resulting from fall accidents. There are various conditions that contribute to falling. It can be body weakness, vision problems, foot pain, or even hazards at home.

How to prevent fall accidents?

There are a number of things you can do to help lower the chances of a fall accident. You can always consult a doctor to help you lower fall incidents in the future. There are a number of strength and balance exercises you can also do at home to keep your body fit and strong. You can also pay a visit to your eye doctor because your vision plays a role with your physical activities.

Walking Steadiness on your iPhone

On top of these, your iPhone is also equipped with a feature that can help you track your walking patterns. The recent iOS 15 update gives you the Walking Steadiness score embedded inside your Heath app. 

Though it cannot physically prevent you from getting into fall accidents, the function helps give you an overview of your walking steadiness score. It gives you an estimate of your stability while you walk. You can get notifications if your walking pattern is low which gives you the chance to look into it before you get into an accident.

Turning Walking Steadiness on in your iPhone

Finding it and turning on the function is pretty easy and straightforward. This feature is available to iPhone 8 or newer which is running on at least iOS 15

Follow these steps to help you to use Walking Steadiness on iPhone:

1. Find and open the Health app.

2. On the lower-left section, tap on the Summary tab.

3. Scroll down to Walking Steadiness Notifications feature and tap the Set Up option.

4. Read the overview and tap Next.

5. Type in your personal details and tap Next.

6. Read about the different levels so you understand it then tap Next.

7. You can choose to receive notifications if you have low or very low walking steadiness by tapping on Turn On. If not, tap on Not Now.

8. Tap Done.

9. Once done, your overview should look like this where you can easily see where you are with your Walking Steadiness.

It is important to take note that this feature will not prevent fall accidents. What it can give is an overview how steady you are walking and alert you if your balance seems off.