Apple’s new Siri personal assistant technology can boost your productivity or provide a few laughs with its quirky responses, but a health policy analyst thinks Siri could go even further, revolutionizing 911 and emergency services.
The prospect of using Siri as a life-saving device is intriguing, and the thoughts and ideas offered by health policy analyst John S. Wilson provide a compelling system in which Siri could connect you to emergency services and provide video to emergency personel, as well as using GPS to reveal your location.
The original report from GigaOM spells out the remarkable possibilities:
Once the word “emergency” is spoken to Siri, a range of beneficial activity could commence. First, the phone could video call 911 utilizing Skype or a similar VoIP video service. This would allow first responders to have a much better context of the emergency at hand. Armed with a live video and audio feed of the event, visual cues could assist the first responders as they deconstruct the problem. Second, Siri could send the GPS location of the caller.
Third, an app could automatically transmit critical information to the nearest hospital.
A new generation of emergency services is already being developed that could automatically add location data to voice, video and text calls, and once the new services are more widely implemented, it would be possible for Apple to integrate the emergency services into its Siri technology.
It’s interesting to think about the ways in which Siri could change the way we interact with the world, and even though it’s not yet possible to use Siri this way, the idea that your smartphone could save your life provides some interesting things to think about.
