Imagine yourself in one of these situations: you’re running alone in the wee hours of the morning, and you fall and break your ankle. Or, you’re walking alone through campus and you can’t help but feel the person behind you has been following you a bit too long. Or, maybe your teenager has a severe peanut allergy and you need to know where they are in case of an emergency.
I’m a runner, and a working Mom with severe allergies, and I was also a college student. When I was in college, the frosh week kit included rape whistles for all of the new girls on campus. The whistle went right onto my keychain, but it wasn’t ‘cool’ so I hardly carried it with me, and I always wondered how my friends and family would know where I was if an emergency happened anyway. Now that I’m a mother I worry about where I am and where my family is even more.
Canadian company Guardly has created an app that is “a mobile personal safety system designed to help you connect to your trusted safety network during an emergency.” It’s an app that I’ve had running for a while on my iPhone and BlackBerry (currently in beta) that has given me a sense of security unlike anything I’ve had in an app before.
How it works
When you install Guardly on your smartphone, the first thing you do is enter in your personal profile. Think of this profile like those cards that come with new wallets. You can include your height, weight, blood type, hair colour as well as contact information for yourself and medical professionals that you deal with. My advice is to be as detailed as possible here, you'll soon see why.
After your profile is set up you add contacts (either from your existing device address book, or you can setup new contacts), and add those contacts to groups like Family, Friends, Campus Friends etc. Finally, you add locations that you frequent (Home, work, school etc.)
Once configured, in the case of an emergency, you simply have to tap the Guardly icon on your phone and your groups are notified by telephone, email & text message that you have an emergency situation. (Don’t worry, the phone vibrates like crazy and gives you time to cancel the request if you’ve hit it accidentally).
Your emergency contacts can join a conference call or connect to an emergency response website that shows your current location as well as your profile information. Within this website, they can see photos that you are taking, and track your location if you’re moving. This means, your emergency contacts know where you are, what you see, and can keep in touch.
And remember that whistle they gave me at Frosh? At any time during an emergency alert, you can use Guardly to play a loud repeating whistle sound to deter would-be attackers or signal for help. Much cooler than carrying my fluorescent green Fox 40.
The free version of Guardly includes the location pin pointing feature and is available for iPhone, and coming soon for Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry devices. The premium edition is $9.99/ month, or $99 / year and provides the conference call, website, real time tracking, and other features.
I won’t be uninstalling this one, and I think I'll be buying a year subscription for a certain relative heading to university this year.
Guardly is giving away 5 lifetime subscriptions to Guardly's Premium personal safety service. Each winner can then pick 5 other friends or family members who will also receive a lifetime subscription. You can access the contest page here.
Printer-friendly version