For a technology company, being an early adopter of new technologies like the Apple Watch can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you get to be at the vanguard of innovation, solving problems no company has solved before you. The cost of admission, however, includes dealing with technological limitations that would likely be more smoothed out for you if you waited a while.
Many tech savvy consumers are forgiving about hiccups with young tech, but for
, whose app alerts authorities when its users are in need of help, building an Apple Watch app that was anything but completely dependable was out of the question. After all, a personal safety device that works “pretty well” would hardly instill the sense of security its customers seek.
So before LifeLine started on its Apple Watch integration, founder Peter Cahill (pictured right) reached out to Apple to get some pointers on how his team could make its app for the smartwatch as reliable as possible. To his surprise, the notoriously secretive Cupertino titan let his engineers peek behind the curtain, and the two companies’ engineers and UX designers have worked closely together ever since.
“There are different limitations that the watch sets that you don’t have on a regular app, and we had to make sure that would work with our use case,” said Cahill. “So we got integrated with the design department and the engineering department at Apple.”
For instance, Apple puts a limitation on how often the Watch and the user’s phone can communicate with each other. Together with Apple’s engineers, LifeLine’s developers got into the weeds on what could and could not be done with the current iteration of the smart watch.
The solution they came up with was a complication — a button on the watch face that becomes accessible instantly when the screen lights up — saving users from having to dig through the device’s menus at times of emergency.
Once an alarm has been activated, LifeLine’s team will call to ask for a four-digit code that will deactivate it. If nobody answers, the wrong code is provided, or the person answering the phone sounds distressed, the company will instantly call 911 on the user’s behalf and provide them with the device’s location, as well as a description of the user.
While the Apple Watch has its fair share of skeptics, Cahill is excited to be working with the new technology. He points to the negative response to the first iPhone — which had a touchscreen-only interface and was clunky compared with its predecessors at a time when phones were getting increasingly smaller — as an example of how Apple has bucked conventional wisdom in the past.
“If you look at where the size of mobile phones were 15, 16 years ago, they got down to the size of a credit card,” Cahill said. “But Apple created a reason why you wanted to be on a larger phone.”
Looking at the expansion in voice-recognition capabilities in recent years, Cahill now sees the potential for a movement towards fully-featured wearable devices that for many users will take care of everything their smartphones do now.
“I think it’s going to be attached to your wrist,” he said.
Images via LifeLine Response.
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