As I have previously stated, I only wanted a phone that would allow me to make and receive phone calls.
When we recently upgraded by five levels of phone intelligence, I knew life would be altered in certain ways, but not in the direction I anticipated.
While our old phones, sometimes correctly, told us how many steps we’d walked in a day, and how many floors we’d climbed, we figured the answers were good for a few laughs and carried on going up and down, even though it appeared the phone missed a few of the steps and stairs traversed.
Then one day, while sitting and trying to figure how to manoeuvre the new phone from horizontal reading to a vertical landscape, I touched the red heart to see what was happening under that icon. I knew it had to do with health issues and I had previously answered some of the questions: birth date, age, height, weight (none of its business) and other random snoopiness.
After going through some of the options under the heart, I noticed something that might be alarming to conspiracy theorists. This phone is capable of telling me when I walked, the length of my steps, whether I wobble when I walk and could send me an alarm when I’m about to fall down.
Holy Smokes. And all I wanted was to call a friend or have a friend call me.
Surely I had misunderstood this particular feature on this iPhone nestled in a bright red wallet case.
Although I’m always afraid to touch a button I’ve never touched before in the fear I will set off alarms and damage something beyond repair, I bravely went on an adventure of discovery and put the heart to the test.
On this particular day, I supposedly only managed two floors and 56 steps. I guess the phone doesn’t register when it is left on the cupboard upstairs. This is one smart device we brought into our home.
Once it went into my pocket where the phone advised me it should be carried for accurate results, I checked again later in the day and found I had climbed one more flight of stairs. This phone is defective. I know I climbed the stairs more than once in that time period, going up and down with laundry, up and down to the photocopy room, up and down to the TV room.
Then I read the phone’s criteria for stair climbing: a flight of stairs is counted as approximately 10 feet of elevation gain which is about 16 steps. I went and counted. We only have 13 steps which means I’d have to go back down and come back up three steps so make up the difference.
That sounds like a dangerous practice for someone who has also registered low marks for walking steadiness. If I’m wobbly on flat ground, imagine how unsteady I just might be reversing on a set of stairs.
The phone’s informational pages relates that as walking steadiness goes down, the risk of falling goes up. To reassure the phone’s owner, it cautions that steadiness is not an indication of how likely I am to fall in any given moment but an overall sense of fall risk in the next 12 months. That is so comforting, just walking around, unsteady on my feet, waiting to fall sometime in the next year.
Because I was curious, I filled out a small form and will now be notified if my steadiness continues to decline. I am unsure how this notification will be made: will it come via an alarm from my iPhone, will an ambulance be alerted that I am about to fall, will the neighbours be advised to check on me as I am sprawled in the driveway, will shoppers at the grocery store stand and stare as I recline on the ground with my phone beeping to tell me I have fallen?
I’m sure the phone has more information to tell me but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact it knows how steady I am on my feet and that it cares that I might fall down. It cares so much, it has an app to help me improve my steadiness. Of course it does.
But I still just want to phone a friend or have a friend phone me.
Joyce Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
