I have a Garmin 830 and use incident detection through my phone. I have had a couple rough stops which triggered the phone calls. I am usually able to get it stopped before the calls are made except for one time then I started getting calls from my kids and wife making sure everything is ok. I like the idea of knowing that I won't lay in the ditch for too long. lol

Just talked to a friend in Charlotte

It’s to the point you cannot ride on the roads safely around here

Too much growth too fast. With texting and with all the road construction and people not knowing where they are going because they are new.

get in a big group ride or go far out in the country as you can (love Valley for example) have your wife follow you in car or scooter

This is tough (I know)

helmet thing (specialized). They sell those at Bike Source Park Road shopping center.

Tried that app once. sucked up all my battery juice. Maybe it is better now.

Might be worth another try. We have Samsung S10's now, tons of battery power. Even our previous S6's handled both Beacon and life360 running simultaneously. Considering dumping Strava.😋

Although I do not use the Incident alerting feature of my Garmin 520, I do use the Live Track feature. On a couple of long rides I've stopped to take a rest and I'll get a text from my wife asking me if I'm ok? When using this feature also remember to enable the Extend LiveTrack feature in the Garmin phone app. Just in case anything happens your data will still be live for 24 hours. I usually email 2-4 friends with each of my rides. Although this feature is reached through a link in your email, it does give you pretty accurate up to the minute tracking.

Thumbs up on the ANGI devise from Specialized. Comes attached to some helmets or as a stand alone add on and connects through blue tooth to your phone. I have one, it was on my new helmet. It will send a text message to my wife if it detects a significant impact along with my GPS location. It also has a count down from the time of the impact before it sends the message so I can stop an accidental message from being sent. Just extra insurance for somebody out by themselves. Nothing else required, other than the cell phone you probably already have, not much money. Potential life saver. I like it.

I have the Incident Detection setup on my Garmin 520 Plus. It will text three contacts that I designated on my cell phone.
The Incident Detection sometimes goes off on sudden hard stops on rough roads, but you have 30 seconds to cancel.
The first time it went off, I thought WTH is making that noise. One reason I keep my cell phone in my jersey pocket.

Thanks. We've lived here for 25+ years and growth is continuing at an accelerated pace. I'm still able to get out to lower traffic roads from the house but have to ride in traffic for 3-4 miles. But I'm planning to head up to the Love Valley area tomorrow for some more dirt road riding.

The Road ID app will notify people when you are out o a ride and will notify them if you have not moved (presumably due to an incident) for a period of time. You do have the option to cancel the alert or pause the app if you are stopped for a break. It works well

If I or my wife felt that bicycling was so hazardous that I needed to carry a specialized immediate warning/ "incident" detection system to feel comfortable with my bicycle riding, I would give up bicycling.

Ice dot.

My wife enjoyed following my ride today via the Life360 app. Riding dirt and asphalt roads on a 40+mile loop about an hour from our house.

I have the Garmin 520+. I have both LiveTrack and incident detection enabled. LiveTrack went thru a several month period of being very unreliable after a Garmin Connect update in May 2019. Finally some half dozen updates later it seems to have settled down and mostly works.

I’ve had the incident detection go off maybe 8 times in 15 months, all false positives. Sometimes I don’t notice it and my wife gets a message. She’s leaned to check LiveTrack to see if I’m still moving.

I don’t know what sets it off sometimes, once it went off when I simply came to a stop at a traffic light. Smooth road, not a panic stop or other drama. Another time it went off in my driveway after I stopped the bike.

I did actually fall over once last year navigating a very tight switchback on a dirt trail in Whiting Ranch. I was barely moving and fell over, dislocating my left ring finger. The Garmin did NOT detect this one real incident.

I wish that was my experience.

Garmin Edge 530 -- zero success at getting LiveTrack to function.
Road iD phone app "bread crumbs" -- unreliable, but likely the cell service provider deserves some of that blame.
Strava Beacon -- anecdotally has seemed the most stable but even that has failed me on several occasions.
Apple "Find My" app -- works every time... but doesn't update as fast as the other apps.

Saying that, I'll add I think for us aging cyclists the Road iD bracelet is a good add. Since I won't carry my wallet and the driver's license is a pain to remove I think carrying the Road iD on my person is a good thing to include. Probably for an invincible 20-something the weight penalty is too much but for me, I'm ok with it.

better to be prepared than to be caught with you pants down

Have an Apple Watch 4, with fall detection activated to call my wife if I am down for over a specified time period. My iPhone will do the same without the watch also. With my Parkinson's Disease, its a peace-of-mind thing for her, and less to think about for me. My phone app to log rides also ties in to the alarms and all the above items are GPS enabled so they give a location to the designated recipient of the alert.

jppe , I encourage others to try these at least. I have no experience with Garmin, but as popular as they are with the cycling community, someone here can give you the gouge on them.

Bill

I find I enjoy my bicycle riding more, as well as ordinary living when not handicapped by irrational fear of being harmed and left helpless by extremely low probability events, such as lying immobilized on the side of a road or trail by an incident that requires immediate notification and rescue by a loved one.

My wife has enough confidence in my bicycle riding skill and experience and maturity to not take foolish risks so that she doesn't feel the need for tracking my whereabouts whenever I go out for a ride. If I should get into trouble, either I can call her or somebody from the police or EMT's will call her soon enough.

“Dumb”

Oh it won’t happen to me theory

I was also dumbfounded but after I realized it was satire I laughed at my self for being so gullible.

I would recommend that a person should take up a new activity for better mental health if he is so fearful of what might happen when bicycling, regardless of the low probability, that he/she is willing to buy and carry any techno device available that promises even the remotest possibility of being useful after an extremely unlikely bicycling event (disabled and incommunicado and requiring immediate notification of a friend/relative).

I don't think I have an irrational fear of dying that makes me wish to add incident detection to my everyday riding. It is just that it has become something that the technology has gotten to the point where it somewhat works and is inexpensive enough to get. It's not something I'm going to obsess about to the point I wouldn't ride if for some reason it wasn't working that day or days.

As for my one incapacitating crash in over fifty-five years of riding a bike, I just wonder what my outcome would have been if I'd crashed at the other end of the trail that is less frequented by riders, and particularly that day when only a few were out at all. Being dead wouldn't be a problem for me, but being brain damaged or other resulting chronic issues from not getting quick medical attention would be a problem.

Like I previously mentioned, the technology and price of these things is getting close to the point that everyone might ought to talk about and consider if one is appropriate for them. Now if we were talking about requiring their use or such, then that would be something I think is going too far.

I have told folks that don’t feel comfortable to be out riding on the road with vehicles to not ride. It’s tough enough of an activity that if your not comfortable and completely enjoying doing it, maybe it’s not for them.

My situation is not so much about what I’m comfortable with right now. It’s more about keeping my wife supportive of my riding. She’s never said anything negative about my riding, extended time away, costs etc. Heck, she even sagged for me riding across the US, volunteered at tours so I could get into the event and ride, and even rode a week with me across NC on a tandem. She’s very aware of the risks and rewards. When her sensitivities get out of balance I’m just trying to pull them back into balance.

Plus even if there weren’t her concerns, these features or Apps I’ve added should be great tools for her and I in the future. Thinking ahead of riding Natchez Trace in April where she will be sagging for me again, she can now track my location (and me hers) which will greatly help us as we plan stops along the route. It can give her more freedom to do side trips off the Parkway to explore and not worry about if I’ve already passed by.

I will say that there is more risk of getting in an accident today than even 10 years ago in the area that I normally ride in. There’s a tremendous amount of growth in people and vehicles and infrastructure will never catch up. It takes longer to drive to places and people have become more aggressive drivers. Speeding is rampant and out of control. Add to that driver distractions from phones and more people driving under the influence. I’m still riding and hope to be as long as I can but it’s critical to be smart about it.

:thumb:

keep family happy and use the tech available in order to get help if ever needed

Your response makes much sense. I assume that the GPS function of smartphones and a suitable app that allows your wife to keep track of your real time location would meet both you and your wife's needs.

The "incident detection" function, given its unreliability and tendency to give false alarms (as described in several other posts on this thread), seems more likely to cause problems for both the bicyclist and those who either receive the false alarms, or are depending on being the first to be notified of a serious problem from a system that may or may not ever be reliable enough to be counted on in the unlikely event it is ever needed.

I have a question for you or anybody who is familiar with the operation of various incident reporting systems: Do they automatically send unfiltered "incident" notifications to 911 or other local emergency services whenever the system detects an anomoly that it interpets as an "incident"? If so, how do those agencies feel about responding to multiple false alarms?

Good question and I’m not 100% sure......but the applications I’ve seen don’t automatically contact emergency services. You have the ability to enter the information for the people you’d like contacted. In my case I’ve entered my wife and also my brother who is also a cyclist. I’m not sure if the devices actually make phone calls or just do texts and emails. The ones I’ve looked at don’t do phone calls. My wife and brother know to first attempt to get in touch with me should they receive an alert text. I told my wife that I was going to ride my gravel bike on some bumpy roads so she might get a false alarm. I haven’t tested the incident detection, like throwing it down so we’ll see what happens over time.

With the Garmin you can easily turn the alarm off before it alerts anyone (not 911 btw). I have only had one instance of that. It is not unreliable - better a false alarm here or there than no alarm when you might need it. It does have one flaw however - it depends on your phones data capability. That means it is not effective if you are out of cell tower range or your phone gets severely damaged in the incident.

I also use Cyclemeter, and I generally like it. I suggested to them that they tie into the iPhone's accelerometer to detect sudden deceleration and send alerts. They passed on that idea. I have used it to send periodic updates to my wife when I was riding the Southern Tier, which she told me reduced (but did not eliminate) her worries about me. Apple treats Messages (its texting app) as a crown jewel, which is why Cyclemeter can't tie into it. In theory, one could route an e-mail message through a service like Zapier to trigger a text message. One can also post regular updates to Twitter or Facebook, although I don't consider that an improvement.

One thing you can do with an iPhone, without using any 3rd-party apps, is open the Health app and set a Medical ID profile, which will include contact numbers and more information than you could fit on an ID bracelet. This info can be called up by anyone with access to your phone (even when the phone is locked) if they know to look for it. I've never asked a first responder if they're aware of this feature--I hope they are. I assume something similar is available on Android phones.

So said the boy who thought that yelling "wolf" here or there could have no negative effect on an expected response when a real incident occurs after a few false alarms.

Those who receive the false alarms may not agree with your no harm -no foul assessment of sending out false alarms about "incidents" to loved ones or the authorities.

Perhaps you didn't read what I and others wrote. 1. You can turn the false alarm before it notifies anyone (which I had happen only once - it is not an inconvenience) so there is no "cry wolf". 2. You don't set it up to call 911.

My wife gets nervous when I ride alone, especially since we had a friend who had gotten injured in a fall. I usually have my cell phone on my bike so I have starting using an app called Glympse so she can see my location. I can tell it works pretty well as I received a concerned call from her when I was repairing a flat. Since then I tend to send her a text if I'm going to be stopped for a period of time. :)