How To Set Up Emergency Medical ID on iPhone and Apple Watch?
Emergencies in our life come out unannounced. Accidents, mishaps, nobody knows when or how they will happen, but when they do, there is little we can do then, and it is terribly important that we make sure we do everything in our power for scenarios like this.
Mobile phones have been one of the best inventions for us, one small simple tool that we can carry almost everywhere, all the time, with features and capabilities that can sort out the worst of the problems.
Talking about emergencies and mobile phones, there is one important feature related to an emergency on our mobile devices, that is the emergency medical ID. So what is this emergency medical ID feature? Let’s find out!
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How To Set Up Emergency Medical ID on iPhone and Apple Watch?
What is Emergency Medical ID?
An emergency medical ID is a feature that can be found on your iPhone. What does it do you might ask? So what it does, is enabling a button on your iPhone’s or Apple Watch’s lock screen that will, when toggled, display emergency medical information about you, or basically the person who owns the device and the data he or she has submitted in it.
This kind of information can help in a lot of ways. Let’s see them.
What information does it show?
When an emergency medical ID feature on an iPhone or an Apple Watch is used, it will open a tab/page that will show a list of information about your medical details. The details are as follows –
- Full legal registered name
- Date of Birth (and Age)
- Any special medical conditions
- Allergies or reactions
- Medications (if any)
- Blood Group Type
- Height
- Weight
- Emergency contact (parents/spouse etc)
Who can use the feature?
Once you have enabled this feature, if there are any mishaps, road accidents, or any accidents where you are in an unconscious/injured state, unable to help yourself or even identify yourself, anyone who spots you, finds out, like a passerby, first responders, cops or ambulance, they can use your mobile phone to use this feature and find out all the information they can find about you so that there is ensurance of no delay in providing you with appropriate help needed.
For example, to find out the required blood group in case of injuries, or call emergency contact to get more information about you, to ensure your safety.
How to enable emergency medical ID feature?
Now that we know pretty much what the emergency medical ID feature does, let us find out how do we enable it/set it up on our iPhones and Apple Watches.
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Open “Health”
To set up emergency medical ID feature on our iPhone, we will start with the pre-installed application called “Health”.
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Go to ‘Summary’
After opening the “health” app, move forward and open the ‘summary’ tab. In the summary section, you will find a small circular icon on the right corner, with your profile picture.
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Reach ‘Medical Details’
Now in the summary section, our next target is to open the tab labeled as “Medical Details”, after opening the medical details, you will find an option that says “Medical ID”, this will be our direct destination to input the medical information for our Emergency Medical ID on iPhone and Apple Watch.
Tap on the “Medical ID” tab to further input your details.
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Edit
On the top right you will find an option that says “edit”, tap on it to input and modify the information asked in the medical ID such as allergies and weight.
Now one important deal is to make sure this information is available on our lock screen as when someone needs it, they don’t have to deal with a locked screen and an unknown password.
So to do that, we are going to toggle enable the option which says “Show when locked”. It can be found by scrolling a bit,
The “Share during emergency call” option can also be enabled if you want to send your Medical ID details with the emergency medical services in the scenario if you make an emergency call.
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Done.
Once all the settings are enabled and information is submitted, tap on “Done” to finalize the applications. And we have our “emergency medical ID” ready!
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Emergency Contact
In some scenarios, one of your contacts can be needed, in that case, you can also add an emergency contact. In the ‘medical ID’ section only, scroll down to find the ‘emergency contact’ option and tap on the green plus (+) icon present in front of it.
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For Apple Watch
Apple Watches are paired with our iPhones, therefore to enable “Emergency Medical ID” on our Apple Watches, we need to input and set data of our Medical ID through our iPhone first.
When we have done that, we only need to set it through our Apple Watch to view, as it automatically gets enabled in the watch too, if you have enabled the “show when locked” option.
To access it through your Apple Watch, hold the side button until the slider appears. Now when the “Medical ID” appears, drag your slider towards the right.
Conclusion
So this was our detailed, easy to go guide for setting up Emergency Medical ID on iPhone and Apple Watch. Since this information is very useful and can turn out to be a lifesaver, share this with your friends, family, and make sure to enable and use the correct data as it can be disastrous if there is any misinformation. Be careful, have a good day!