Preparedness Toolkit: ICE for Your Lock Screen

For several years, the idea of saving an ICE – In Case of Emergency – contact in your mobile phone has been floating around the Internet. The intent is that if you’re incapacitated by injury or illness, first responders can use that information to get in touch with your designated emergency contact. However, with so much personal information on our smartphones these days, few of us leave our phones unlocked – which presents a problem for someone who needs that information in a hurry.

An option for keeping an ICE contact on your phone that doesn’t compromise your security is to put your emergency contact information in the image on your lock screen. There are few ways to do this. You can use photo editing software to write directly into an image, then copy it to your phone’s photo gallery. If your emergency contact has a business card, you can take a picture of that. If you have good handwriting, you can get artistic with a dry-erase board, chalkboard, or legal pad, then photograph the resulting calligraphic masterpiece.

There’s also at least one mobile app designed specifically for this task. Acadian ICE (publisher’s screen shot shown at right) lets you select an existing photo on your phone and copy a selected contact’s information onto it. It’s a free download for Apple iOS and Google Android.