Human curiosity is inevitable. Human feeling of invincibility is one of man's greatest weakness.
When we receive a message or a call while driving, some may have the will power to ignore the distraction, but most, intelligent and not, will succumb under the pressure of curiosity. This happens daily, hundreds of thousands of times, if not millions, every day on the roads across the nation and around the world.
For some time now I've been enjoying the new do not disturb (DND) feature of the iPhone. Only a select list of people from my exception list can ring or message me during one specified interval of time -- how wonderful it has been to finally, in a passive way, reclaim my time to focus or simply sleep without interruption.
How could I passively have the same results while driving? I know I'm on the road on certain times, say 8-9am and 6-7pm, however DND feature only allows me one time slot -- and the sleep window won by wide margin. Even if we could specify multiple time slots within DND, the static time slots does not take into consideration atypical windows, say a 7am commute, or other trips thought the day like lunch or simply holidays. So, while the multiple do not disturb time windows allows for greater flexibility, we still need a more refined way of applying it passively while driving.
My proposal:
- enable option to have DND like features while in motion like driving
- allow a margin for human softness, say 5 min after last detection motion (e.g. Traffic lights, etc.)
- implement it with battery efficiency by using triangulation of cell towers (preferred) or low accuracy GPS
- allow exception list (I see this as enhanced DND, so same list from DND exception would apply)
- apply parental lock so child cannot turn it off.
Summary:
This is very easy for Apple to implement. All the plumbing is already present to release this as soon as even the upcoming iOS release. I'm not a parent yet, but as a parent I would enforce this with a parental lock. As a parent I would prefer to have the occasional inconvenience of being out of reach but yet with the assurance distraction is deferred. Yes, there are some false positives such as being a passenger in a vehicle, but these are exceptional and hardly sufficient to justify not implementing this toggle-able life saving feature.
...
At the end of the day, Apple cares, and this is certainly an underdeveloped area Apple can make a huge difference much like Apple has in many others such as accessibility.
Sincerely,
Michael Olivero
Sent from my iPad