Did you know that your Android phone can save your life?
And it’s not just Androids like the LG GS or Moto X4 but any kind of smartphone, including the iPhone X! The secret is letting your phone do the talking for you in an emergency. And the way to do that is with ICE. By the way if you’d like to download these instructions, just click here for the PDF version.
What is ICE?
During Hurricane Katrina, so many people were injured, unconscious and separated from their families that emergency workers came up with the idea of putting an ICE – In Case Of Emergency – Contact in their cell phones. Now, when a patient who is unconscious or unable to speak comes into the emergency room, hospitals worldwide check their smartphone for an ICE contact, to help them locate their next of kin. Everyone in your family should have an ICE contact in his or her smartphone. In fact, they should have two just in case the first contact is unavailable. If you have our book Ready, you should already have at least one ICE contact. So let’s learn how to set one up on an Android Phone.
Before You Begin…
…you’d better decide who your ICE Contacts will be. The first one of course will be your spouse, partner, best friend or close relative. Someone that you want there with you at the hospital or, if need be, making decisions on your behalf. But what if that person is also injured, or is out of town or forgot to charge their phone? Why not choose one additional person to be an ICE Contact – someone very close to you, who you know will drop everything to race to your side and handle things until your significant other can be reached.
Let’s set up your first ICE Contact.
Touch the Contacts Icon on your phone to open up your Contacts. Click on the plus sign + to add a new contact and touch the First Name Field. Don’t put the name of your contact in this field, only the word ICE. We’re doing this because most Android phones sort contacts by their first name by default. You’ll want your contact to show up as ICE — not as your contact’s actual name.
Next, touch the Last Name Field and enter your contact’s full name and relationship to you, ie. John Jones Husband. Now when someone looks at the contact, they’ll see ICE along with your emergency contact’s full name. Do the same thing for your second ICE contact – then call it ICE2.
Time To Make Your Phone Do Some Heavy Lifting…
The best thing about a smartphone is that you can put everything that you need to communicate, right inside this one contact. Here’s the basic information you need to include: Put all the information you possibly can into your two ICE Contacts. For example:
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Your emergency contact’s Main Number/Cell number/ Work number, Relationship to you
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Email Address & IM, Twitter and Facebook address (in case landlines are down & you need to send an emergency message )
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Other info, for example, days that the contact is at a certain location
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Add extra fields if you need them.
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Use the Notes Section to list your Allergies, Current Medications or the Names & Numbers of your Physicians.
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Be sure to include every piece of information you can. Why? Because you never know what type of communication will or won’t be working. For instance, after the Japan earthquake, many people were able to reach each other via Twitter or Facebook even though their landline phones and Wi-Fi weren’t working.
How is it that a book about optimizing a smart phone is NOT available as a e-book for Kindle, on Amazon??
Hi Victor, So glad you asked! In fact we do have an ebook version, but just not on Kindle. Our Backup Plan ICE My Phone Kit has many graphics, which contain the instructions for each phone. But no matter how many times we’ve tried to create a Kindle file, we can’t get the graphics to display correctly on the pages. The good news is, that the downloadable version of the book is available on Gumroad at this link https://gum.co/icekit. Not only can you purchase the book at that link, but you can immediately download all of the extras that come with it. You can also purchase a downloadable version of our book The Backup Plan at https://gum.co/BP30.
Hope that helps! Hopefully Kindle can figure out a way for us to be able to create a version of the book, very, very soon. Thanks so much and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.
All the best, Laura and Jan
I had a Samsung phone with iCE feature and thought it something useful. Now I have a new Samsung phone and since I didn’t find that feature anymore I started searching Google. It might have been changed or moved or I might have been simply too thick to figure it out.
I came across some advice from German paramedics who urged people not to have an ICE contact set up. The simple reasoning behind that is phone thieves abusing it by scaring ICE contact with made up emergencies. And since this feature isn’t standard on every phone paramedics don’t check phones anyway. Another point is that paramedics and police don’t want any non professionals who may give first aid informing family or loved ones about emergencies by phone and possibly not even having all the facts.
It’s a double edged sword. Damn if you do and damn if you don’t. ICE contacts are useful, yet you really don’t want a call coming in from a loved one’s phone with a stranger’s voice telling you about an emergency.
Being German and living in Germany this is advice I can’t dismiss out of hand. Things might be different in the US.
Hi Michael, Thanks so much for visiting the blog and for your comment. As far as I know, this hasn’t been a problem in the US. Sorry to hear that about Germany, though. Terrible! It might be better for you to carry an emergency wallet card in your wallet or backpack which aren’t as likely to be stolen or left behind as a phone. You can find a post about wallet cards and a link to download one of our fill in EMCs free at .
Have a great day! Laura and Jan
Really enjoyed this article post. Fantastic.