Fall Detection
If your iPhone detects a serious fall, I'm Alive asks if you're okay. If you don't answer, it alerts your emergency contacts for you — which matters most when you can't reach your phone yourself.
Please read this first
Fall detection is best-effort, not a medical device. It will not catch every fall, and it can occasionally be triggered by something that isn't one. It alerts your emergency contacts, not emergency services. In an emergency, always call your local emergency number.
On iPhone it watches while the app is open, not around the clock — Apple does not allow any third-party app to keep reading motion sensors in the background. What that means →
What happens when a fall is detected
1. Your phone asks if you're okay
A large, loud prompt with vibration — designed to be noticed if you're dazed or the phone is across the room.
2. If you tap "I'm OK", it stops there
Nobody is contacted. You never have to confirm an alert to stay safe — you only have to cancel one to stay quiet.
3. If you don't answer, your contacts are alerted
A missed countdown is the alert. That's deliberate: the person who most needs help is the one who can't reach their phone to confirm anything.
Why dropping your phone doesn't set it off
This is the single most common reason people think fall detection isn't working — so it's worth explaining properly.
A falling phone and a falling person look completely different to the sensors. When a person falls, they rotate on the way down and then stay still. When a phone slips out of your hand, it just lands — no rotation that resembles a body, no stillness that follows a person going down.
Fall detection looks for that whole pattern, not just a bump. If we made it sensitive enough to fire on a dropped phone, it would also fire when your phone slid off the sofa, or off the car seat, or off the bed at night — and each time, your family would get an alarm. People switch off a feature that cries wolf, and then it isn't there on the day it's needed.
So: a dropped-phone test doing nothing is fall detection working correctly, not failing. To actually see it work, use the built-in drill — it safely turns the sensitivity right up for the duration of the test.
How to test fall detection safely →What you need
An iPhone
Android coming soonFall detection runs on iPhone today. Android is coming soon — it's built and in testing, and we'll turn it on once we're confident the alert reaches your contacts every time, which matters more than shipping it early. If you're on Android meanwhile, every other part of your safety net — check-ins, SOS, escalation alerts — works normally today.
Protect Me or Protect Me On The Move
Fall detection alerts your emergency contacts, so it needs a plan that includes contact alerts. Free and Lifetime accounts can still run the test drill to see how it behaves. Compare plans.
Motion access, and the switch turned on
Fall detection is off until you turn it on. There are no sensitivity levels to choose — we tune it centrally so you don't have to guess at numbers.
Your movement stays on your phone
The sensors are read on your device and the motion itself never leaves it. We don't upload a stream of how you move, and we couldn't reconstruct your day from what we store. When a fall is detected we record that an event happened and how it was resolved — so we can tell whether the feature is working — not a recording of your movements.
When it's actually watching
On iPhone, fall detection watches while the app is open
Apple does not let any third-party app keep reading motion sensors once it has been in the background for more than a few moments. So if your iPhone is in your pocket with I'm Alive closed, fall detection is not sensing. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you rely on something that isn't there.
This is why your daily check-in is the part that always works. It doesn't depend on the app being open, or on sensors, or on the phone being in your pocket — if you don't check in, the alert goes out regardless. Fall detection is an extra layer on top of it, not a replacement for it.
Battery cost is small: it uses the low-power motion sensors rather than GPS.
Next steps
Still stuck? Email support@imalive.co and a human will answer.