ICE contact
Do you have ICE contact in your phonebook? I think everybody should have. So ICE stands for ‘In Case of Emergency’ . The original concept, conceived by Cambridge paramedic Bob Brotchie, involved putting the acronym ICE in front of your designated emergency contact.
This is a great idea, but you might lose caller id of your most used contact, because most likely ICE is someone who you already have in phonebook. If you add ICE card and it has the same number than earlier entry, calling line identification is not working anymore. Phone is using few last numbers of phone number to match with names and when there are 2 names with the same number it won’t show any name. On icecontact pages there is a hint to add * after the number and it will fix this problem. I think the idea is just to save ICE number to common place, but it would be nice that calling from this particular device to ICE calling also works without editing the contact or using separate phone. With my S60 phone and Sonera SIM card I just get number not in use message if there is * added after number.
What I’m thinking here is a new feature for the phonebook. When you open the phone for the first time, it should ask date, time, location and finally ICE contact. (Of course if should be possible to add ICE contact later on). This ICE contact should be separated from the others so that it doesn’t mess up caller id display. This feature would promote ICE idea and maybe after 2 or 3 years almost everyone would have ICE in the contacts. One principle around ICE is that the person whose name and number you are giving has agreed to be your ICE partner. Phone could then send SMS to your ICE contact and inform that you have added he or she to this contact.
What do you think? Any comments? No promises about delivery schedule. Now finally some models are getting energy saving alerts and this could be also nice Corporate Social Responsibility act from Nokia.
I agree this would be a nice feature. It’s along similar lines of having contacts in the addressbook being able to share bits of information that I wished for on Tommi’s blog a while ago. If that were possible you could create an ICE contact whose number field simply refers to the number of your chosen ICE contact.
Thinking about it, it would be nice if I could indicate that an entry in my addressbook is me (Mac OS X addressbook lets you do this btw). This could be implemented in a similar fashion to setting an ICE contact. In emergency situations it may be useful to helpers so they can quickly identify you too.
This would also be good for other purposes like auto-filling my name on webpage forms in the browser (again OS X does this) and using my contact details when configuring any apps that may require them (For example, when setting up an IM client it can automatically take my name and photo).
Since we’re already forced to use 1 as the quick dial for answering service (which I and everyone I know never even use, BTW…), why not put ICE as quick dial number 9 or something?
If this was adopted by all manufacturers, it would be easy: emergency workers just press 9 for a while and they get the ICE contact.
Good idea Jouni. Keep it easy and simple; not some fancy nancy feature.
A simple addition as James suggested; another entry identifying “myself”. I think some Nokia phones do have them. Like the 9300i.
Not so good Symbiatch; my speed dials a very precious, please don’t take one away
Boom