My Apple Watch Tried to Save Me From...Volleyball?

Last week, my wife and I had our first game in a local rec center volleyball league. We usually do sand volleyball in the summer, but since it's January an indoor league was our only option. As it so happens, this is also my first time playing volleyball since upgrading from a Series 3 to a Series 5 Apple Watch.

You may know where this is going.

Our team circled up to practice a bit before the game, and I bumped the ball across the circle. Moments later my Apple Watch was buzzing up a storm. "It looks like you've taken a hard fall." I laughed and told my wife as it happened — how funny that bumping a volleyball tricked the Apple Watch into thinking I had fallen and couldn't get up.

The Fall Detection feature is quite useful, I just hope that crying wolf on a volleyball court doesn’t bite me if I actually fall one day.

Then it happened three more times, on three consecutive bumps. The humor quickly turned into annoyance, and I ditched my Apple Watch for the remainder of our volleyball night. Perhaps Apple needs to add more customization or contextual smarts to the fall detection feature — the option to automatically disable it during certain Workout types that incessantly trigger false positives, for example. Better yet: they should add this and other Apple Watch Settings toggles to Shortcuts; then I could make my own set of Automations for this exact purpose!