Gadgetory

hey guys today's episode of the android guy weekly is coming to you a day later than it normally would the reason for that was a family emergency now I'm not going to tell you all the details about what happened but I would like to share some things that I learned about how technology can help what I wish I would have done to be more prepared my android-powered smartphone let's go take a look so we're going to talk about two kinds of emergencies to prepare for one that involves you where you can't answer for yourself the other one that involves someone else where you are there answering medically relevant questions for them and would be a good idea if you had a bunch of information so you can answer those questions accurately so in the first scenario let's say you've been in a car crash your unconscious first responders are on scene they know who you are because they have checked your driver's license but they don't know who to contact and they don't know if you have any allergies or anything they should be aware of what do they do well there's your smartphone they pull it out they look at it they might not have an Android they might use an iPhone they might have you know an old feature phone or Windows Phone they've got to open up your phone find your contacts app I hope it's somewhere close find your eye CEE in case of emergency contact that hopefully you've put in there and then make call now that that's an awful lot of assumptions and honestly they can figure it out my four-year-old can figure out any smartphone out there so they can figure it out it's just going to take time time that they could spend giving attention to you or treating you in a manner that was more consistent with what you needed for example they might not know that you're allergic to penicillin until they find that person call them get a response back that you're allergic to penicillin not not a good situation there's another problem with that in addition to the difficulty in finding it with all the different ecosystems of phones out there today I've got a lock screen on my phone unless they know my code they can't even get into my contacts to find my in case of emergency do you have a lock screen and did you consider that if you do or even if you haven't here's what I'd recommend on android-powered devices and this i'm showing you with ice cream sandwich on your lock screen you can go in and set up owner information it's under security and you can put in your owner information now it doesn't have to be owner information it can be anything you want it can be the Declaration of Independence I don't think you have enough characters for that but it can be anything in this case i put in a person's name their relation to me a phone number where they can be contacted and a list of my allergies now this wasn't specific to me this was just for an example but you can see where I'm going with that without even having to know how to use my phone they turn it on they see my lock screen they know all that information right there no problem your phone probably has something similar but that you can use to help speed up the process of knowing about any allergies or any medical conditions they should know about and contacting someone who can't speak for you while you're incapacitated so there's that part the next part and this is what happened to us we had a family member who's an older gentleman and he had a nickel emergency in the middle of the night and we were in the emergency room all day long all day long he's okay and stable now but it was a little bit scary what it was good that we had was my wife had her android-powered phone it was a Galaxy Nexus with her and when the nurses were asking what medications does he take well in this case this particular individual because of some health history in the past takes literally dozens yeah over 30 medications that they need to know about before they start putting an IV drip with medication and whatnot into him they need to know if anything is going to counteract or interact adversely with what this individual is taking well luckily my mother-in-law had a piece of paper in her purse that had this information on it but it was several months out of date and inaccurate my wife on the other hand an up to date list on her phone see she's the one that keeps this list and she sends a copy over and my mother-in-law printed out puts it in her purse well in this case she had an old copy in her purse but mine my wife had this up-to-date copy on her phone she was able to pull her phone out she had it stored in an email not a good idea and I'll get to why and she was able to say no no no if that's wrong this this this this this this many milligrams has been times today worked out great he also has had a significant medical history heart problems and what not defibrillators been implanted in his chest he's got multiple stints gastrointestinal issues doctors need to know this before they start treating you know if his heart work to stop then and they were to put paddles on him that would be bad if they didn't know about his defibrillator that was implanted we kind of be doing two things it's doing the job they're doing the job problems so she has a list of all of his major medical procedures operations and complications that he's had in the past going back for decades again in an email not a problem but it's better than nothing it it was there it was readily available she could read it back to the nurse and her split it into the computer everything was fine he was happy some complications were potentially avoided but what if this would have happened out in the middle of nowhere where data coverage was very very spotty or non-existent she can't get to the cloud to get this document to get this email whether that's Google Docs whether that's Dropbox whether that's just storing it in gmail and doing a search even if you have very slow but you still have data connection it's just very slow doing a search and finding that email is going to take a long time that might be time you don't have save this as a PDF or as a some other kind of text document local to the device so you can refer to it whenever with or without data coverage okay so that's my software tips for you hardware tips she was on the phone all day calling relatives contacting people contacting doctors yada yada yada she has an extended battery for her Galaxy Nexus luckily she did when I got there she was down to twelve percent if she hadn't had that extended battery she would have been dead but the phone would have been dead probably a poor choice of words in this context but I was able to get there with a charger so one extended battery a good investment if your phone will allow it second carry a charger with you guys if you carry a bag put it in your bag if not put it in your car ladies if you carry a purse put it in your purse if not put it in your car someplace where you've got a spare charger so you can plug in when needed okay last topic a lot of hospitals say no cell phones allowed you know what that's fine airplane mode just go into airplane mode tip there you go I'm on airplane mode life signal is an interfering with your equipment so I'm just here reading off this as if it's an e-book at this point most administrators are going to be just fine with that then when you need to make and receive phone calls you can step outside exit airplane mode and make those phone calls get those emails send those texts anything that you need right there ok so I apologize for having the episode out at daylight couldn't be avoided in this case and I learned an awful lot from it and hopefully you learned something from my experience so you'll be better prepared in the unfortunate event that this might happen to you or someone that you know and love again I hope not but if you're prepared it'll be much better experience for you and hopefully it will turn out better than it would otherwise kind of a somber episode today I apologize for that if you have other tips in this type of situation please let us know in the comments again this episode is all about you guys the conversation starts with you so keep it up let us know in the comments if you like hearing this kind of information please give the video a big thumbs up head over to pocketnow.com to read The Associated article and keep up to date on other news and tips as well for pocket now and the android guy weekly i'm joe levi