Your Card · Vital Info
Critical Allergies
Not every allergy belongs on your watch: hay fever will not change anyone’s decisions in an emergency. This section is for the ones that could, such as medicines, foods, insect stings and materials like latex that turn up constantly in medical settings.
Why allergies matter more in an emergency
A responder has seconds to make decisions that would normally involve a conversation and a look at your chart. Penicillin and other antibiotics, aspirin and similar painkillers, the contrast dye used in CT scans and latex gloves are all things a hospital reaches for by default, unless it knows not to. An allergy list on your wrist can prevent exactly that kind of accident.
The list: 29 common allergies
The list is built from published allergen lists: the major food allergens named by the US FDA, the EU (Regulation 1169/2011), Food Standards Australia New Zealand and Health Canada, checked against medical and safety bodies such as ACAAI, ASCIA, OSHA and the WHO. Each one is a single switch you turn on. They fall into five groups:
Drugs
- Penicillin / beta-lactam antibiotics
- Sulfa drugs
- NSAIDs / Aspirin
- Anaesthesia agents
- Iodinated contrast dye
- Opioids
- ACE inhibitors
Material
- Latex
Stings
- Bee
- Wasp / hornet / yellow jacket
- Fire ant
Food
- Peanut
- Tree nuts
- Shellfish
- Fish
- Milk / dairy
- Egg
- Wheat
- Soy
- Sesame
- Molluscs
- Celery
- Mustard
- Lupin
- Sulphites
Environment
- Pollen (hay fever)
- Dust mite
- Animal dander
- Mould
On the card each allergy appears under its plain name, such as “Penicillin / beta-lactam antibiotics” or “NSAIDs / Aspirin”.
Picking from the list, or typing your own
On the phone, turn on the switch beside each allergy that applies. On the watch, Critical Allergies is a single list: Show first, then every allergy with a tick box (the ticked ones first), and last Other allergies, a text box for anything the list does not cover. Select a row to tick or untick it; select Other allergies to type. The same text box is on the phone page, so what you type in one place is in the other.
Separate several typed allergies with commas, for example Latex, Kiwi fruit. Allergies you tick and allergies you type are shown together on the card.
How it looks on the card
Under Vital Info, press START to open Medical Alerts. The allergies come first, under the heading Critical Allergies, in large text that wraps over as many pages as it needs; continuation pages are marked “(CONT.)”. If you turn Show off, or tick and type nothing, the section is left out.