Anyone in Dubai living with a serious medical condition can register their phone number with the police so that responders see their health details the moment a call comes in. Dubai Police made that appeal after an incident in which the system’s absence nearly cost a woman her life — her number was not on the list when she collapsed at the wheel and went silent on the line.
Doctors later traced her loss of consciousness to a severe drop in blood sugar. By the time officers forced open her locked car in a sandy patch off Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road, she was already unresponsive, and only a phone signal had led them to her.
The signal came from a call placed to the Operations Room at 3:30 a.m. A woman managed a few words of Arabic — she was at an intersection — then her voice gave out. The handler had answered within three seconds and kept asking questions, but the reply was only weak groaning, then nothing. He turned to the force’s call-location technology, which placed her phone in the Nad Al Sheba area near the highway.
Rather than hang up, he held the line open to listen for any sign of her while sending every nearby patrol toward the turnoffs branching off Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road. One unit found a parked, locked vehicle. Through the still-connected call, the operator could hear officers rapping on the window before they saw her slumped inside. A rescue team reached the spot despite it sitting well off the paved road network, opened the car, and got her out.
Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, who recounts the episode in his book ‘Operations Management in Critical Incidents, Crises and Disasters’, phoned to check on her after she was admitted to hospital. She later thanked the responders directly: “You arrived so quickly and saved me from death.”
The same emergency technology has reached far beyond the city. Abdullah Bourguiba was in Kazan, Russia — more than 3,600km from Dubai — when he used the ‘Your Security at the Touch of a Button’ application to call for help for an Al Wasl Sports Club player facing emergency surgery. The app sends a distress alert with exact GPS coordinates straight to the Command and Control Centre in the General Directorate of Operations, and Dubai Police coordinated with UAE authorities to get the player treated despite the distance. The feature exists precisely for the moment a person cannot say where they are — the same silence that, weeks or worlds apart, both callers were counting on someone to break.
