Emergency SOS

To prepare for emergency situations, you can set up an emergency contact and enable some other features beforehand that might even save your life. In Samsung phones, you can call an emergency contact by pressing the power button 5 times. But what’s even more helpful than that is the emergency sharing feature.

You can also enable sharing your information with emergency contacts. If you start emergency sharing, then the phone will automatically send a message to your emergency contacts with your exact coordinates on Google Maps and a picture taken from both front and rear camera every 15 minutes for 24 hours. It will also notify your emergency contacts if your phone battery starts running low.

In this tutorial, we will show how to add an emergency contact and demonstrate the emergency sharing feature.

First, go to the Settings menu by either clicking on the gear icon or scrolling down on your home screen and clicking on the top right hand corner.

After opening settings, scroll down until you find ‘Safety and Emergency’ tab. Let’s click on it.

From here click on ‘Emergency SOS’. Now in this new page shown to the right, you will see there is no place to enable the ‘Emergency SOS’ feature. That’s because this feature is enabled by default and your current emergency contact is set to 911. Even though this feature always stays enabled, the chance of accidentally calling emergency services is incredibly low because pressing the power button 5 times unintentionally is nearly impossible.

Now, for demonstration purposes, we of course don’t want to call the police. So, let’s see how to change the emergency contact number. Let’s click on the ‘Emergency number to call’ option. Here you will different preset options. If you want to add a number that’s not on this list, click on ‘Custom number’.

Now, enter your emergency contact number and click ‘Done’. Now, when you press the power button back to back 5 times, your phone will call this number.

Now, going back to the ‘Emergency SOS’ page, you will see the countdown option is currently disabled. In this state, if we press power button 5 times, the system displays what’s shown to the right. We can now just swipe upwards to call this number.

However, if we enable the countdown feature, then after pressing the power button 5 times, the phone will count down from 10 to 0, and then allow you to swipe up to call this number. Also, note that enabling countdown opens the option to play an warning sound during countdown. The sound is kind of like a fire alarm. You can click on the small ‘Test sound’ button to hear it and enable this sound if you want to.

If you scroll down in this ‘Emergency SOS’ page, at the bottom, you will see ‘Share info with emergency contacts’ feature. To enable this awesome feature, let’s click on it.

As we don’t have any emergency contacts added yet, the system will ask us to add an emergency contact. Click on ‘Add contacts’

This will take you to another page where we will click on ‘Add emergency contact’. Now the phone will show your list of contacts and you can search them by their phone number or the name by clicking on the search bar at the top.

Once you have found the person you want to add as your emergency contact, click on their name and a blue check mark will appear to the left. Now, click on ‘Done’.

Now, you will see that contact has been successfully added under emergency contacts. Let’s click on the back button go back to the ‘Emergency Sharing’ page.

Now, you can finally enable the ‘Emergency Sharing’ feature. If you start emergency sharing, then the phone will automatically send a message to your emergency contacts with your exact coordinates on Google Maps every 15 minutes until 24 hours. However, if you enable, the ‘Attach pictures’ option, then the phone will also send a photo from both the front and back camera and send along with your coordinates.

To start emergency sharing, click on ‘Start emergency sharing’. It will show a confirmation popup with details about emergency sharing. Let’s click ‘Start’.

Now, your emergency contact will receive a message saying “The sender needs emergency help” along with their coordinates on Google maps. We have blurred the coordinates here for privacy reasons.

If you stop emergency sharing, then your emergency contact will receive a message saying “Sender tapped a button to stop emergency sharing. You’ll no longer receive emergency messages from them.”

We understand this has been a long tutorial but congratulations! You now know everything about emergency sharing and SOS messages. Spread the word and stay curious!

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