Actually, I Turned the Hand Washing Timer Off

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When Apple introduced watchOS 7, there was a silly little feature that exemplified 2020. A hand washing timer. It would use AI to combine sound and motion to figure out when you’re washing your hands. In some brief testing, it seemed to work. I even liked it. However, as time went on, I realized that it was deeply flawed and incredibly annoying. I’ve since turned it off and stopped washing my hands.

I kid, I still wash my hands. I just don’t have to wait on the annoying sounds from my watch.

Pausing

The most annoying aspect of the hand washing feature wasn’t that it doesn’t always detect when you start washing your hands. At its worse, this could take 15 seconds, and then it would start its countdown from 5. No, the most annoying thing was the fact that it would stop counting.

Let’s say you’re washing your hands. Great, right? Gets rid of all of those nasty germs. You rub your hands together for a bit to get the soap everywhere. Next you turn your left palm up and make a pinching gesture with your right hand. You swirl your fingertips in your palm, ensuring you get your fingers and under your nails. While you were doing that, your watch noticed you weren’t moving your left hand anymore, so it paused your countdown timer. The same thing happens when you’re making a scratching gesture with your fingers in your right palm. I found I’d have to wash my hands for 45 seconds to a minute for it to register 20 seconds of hand washing. For all the beeping and buzzing it does, not even to give me an accurate countdown, that’s annoying without any payoff.

The Apple Watch only counts the time when you’re doing the basic “hand wringing” rubbing gesture. The rest, it doesn’t recognize. And that’s okay, on its own. It can take time to teach an AI that there are other motions. But it encourages bad hand washing technique (that’s an important thing now). Furthermore, Apple didn’t have to stop the timer so abruptly and frequently.

Options

Apple shouldn’t stop counting down if it’s perceiving any small, repeated motion. It shouldn’t figure you’ve stopped until either the water shuts off (if it’s been running for most of the washing time), or the second time the water shuts off, if the person only used it to wet their hands and then go to lather up.

As it exists now, the feature is far too likely to stop counting or even scold you for ending your hand washing while you’re still washing your hands. It was a cute feature, and it could have really helped remind people to be extra careful with their hand washing, but Apple’s feature is just too unreliable.

Plus, it was more capable of detecting when I was doing the dishes. What’s up with that?