Frequently Asked Questions

No. EmergencyAid never calls anyone and does not send an alert. It shows your medical details, your contacts, your location and the right emergency number, so that whoever does call has what they need. Garmin’s own Assistance, Incident Detection and inReach features are the ones that summon help; EmergencyAid is not a replacement for them.

No. It is for you as much as for anyone else. It is a personal emergency assistant: you can use it yourself to look up your doctor’s number, check your medicines and allergies, see your coordinates and Plus Code, and find the emergency number for the country you are in, when you are stressed, unwell or travelling. It is also a way to pass information on: a paramedic, a first responder, or anyone else who has access to your watch can read the same card and scan a QR code to call a contact.

Anyone who has your watch and opens EmergencyAid. The card opens straight away, with no PIN, because it is meant to be read by a responder or a stranger who picked up your watch. Only enter what you are comfortable with them seeing. The information stays on the watch: see Settings & Privacy.

No. Your card, the Local Help numbers for 227 countries and territories, and your position from the watch’s GPS all work on the watch alone, in a place with no signal. A phone is only needed if you want to fill in your details through the Garmin Connect IQ app instead of typing them on the watch.

Local Help follows you. When EmergencyAid opens it uses the watch’s last known position and a short GPS check, and switches to the numbers for the country you are in. If you use Australia’s states and territories, it picks the one you are in. You can also choose a country by hand under Settings > Local Help. See Local Help.

Numbers you type the way you would dial them at home are shown with your country’s calling code, so a responder anywhere can dial them. A number such as 0400 111 222 becomes +61 400111222. Set your country in Identity. A number that already starts with + is left as it is.

Hold the phone steady about the width of a hand from the watch, with the screen square to the camera and not at an angle. Make sure the watch screen is bright: with Boost backlight on, pressing a button or touching the screen asks for full brightness. Avoid glare from a window or a light. If it still does not scan, the phone numbers are on the contact’s page, just before the code, and can be dialled by hand.

A short code, such as 4RRH46V8+74, that names a small area of the Earth. It is an open standard (also called an Open Location Code), shorter than latitude and longitude and easier to read out over the phone. Anyone can type it into Google Maps or at plus.codes to see where it is. See Location for how to read one.

The watch has not found enough satellites yet. Move outdoors with a clear view of the sky and wait up to a minute. Indoors, in a car, or between tall buildings the fix can be slow or missing. Local Help still works, because it falls back on the watch’s last known position and your chosen country.

A vital appears only when it is switched on in Settings and the watch has a reading for it from the last 24 hours. If the page is missing, check that the watch is worn, that all-day heart rate or the pulse oximeter is turned on in your Garmin settings, and that the watch has those sensors. See Live Vitals.

No. Garmin keeps those features in the watch’s own system and does not make them available to apps like EmergencyAid. If you use them, they work on your watch independently. EmergencyAid shows heart rate, temperature and blood oxygen only, and only those your watch records.

No. It is the reading of the watch’s temperature sensor at your wrist, shown as Sensor Temperature. It is useful as a trend, not as a clinical thermometer measurement.

Start with what would change a responder’s decisions: blood type, allergies (especially to medicines), conditions such as diabetes or epilepsy, medicines you take regularly, implants and devices, and at least one person to call. Then add anything they could not guess, in Important Notes. Leave out what would not help: hay fever, for example, rarely changes anything in an emergency.

Type it in the Other box of that section, on the phone or on the watch. The conditions and devices lists are starting points that have not been clinically reviewed, so do not assume something was left off on purpose.

There are four medication boxes of 60 characters each. Put the ones that matter most in an emergency first, such as blood thinners, insulin, and heart and seizure medicines. You can name two related medicines in one box, and Important Notes has four more lines of 120 characters.

A section with nothing in it, or with its Show switch off, has no page. Identity, Vital Info and Emergency Contacts appear only when there is something to show. See Your Card.

Clear the fields on the watch or on your phone. To remove everything at once, uninstall EmergencyAid from the watch in the Garmin Connect IQ app; the information stored on the watch is removed with it.

No. Your age is worked out from the birth year in your Garmin profile, so it updates itself.

English is available now. German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese and Traditional Chinese are coming soon.

Your own entries are shown exactly as you type them, in any language the watch’s keyboard supports.

EmergencyAid does nothing in the background. GPS runs only for a short check when the app opens and while the Location page is on screen, and the app starts no measurement of its own: vitals are read from the history the watch already keeps.

69 Garmin watches with Connect IQ 5.0 or later, including the Forerunner, fēnix, Venu, epix, Instinct 3 AMOLED, Approach and MARQ families. See Supported Watches.