"Apple’s patent (Application #00901149153, if you’re interested) has a few tricks up its proverbial sleeves to help save your life. It seeks to create an emergency mode for cell phones that determines whether or not the phone call you’re making is an emergency call, and acts accordingly to give you the best chance of getting help. First, the phone would make any emergency call harder to disconnect - a glancing blow to the End key won’t mean the end for you. On top of that, emergency mode would disable all non-critical functions of the phone to try and give you as much juice to make the call as possible.
Also useful is the activation of what the application calls 'emergency phrase buttons'...
Second, those emergency phrase buttons can read off a pre-recorded statement to an emergency worker on the phone. Not only that, a speech synthesizer can read out your current location (using the GPS that wasn’t turned off by emergency mode)..."
