Panic button
A panic button is a dedicated trigger - fixed, wearable, or on a phone screen - that a person presses to summon urgent help.
The button is the simplest part of a safety system and the most scrutinised, because it is the part in the worker's hand at the worst moment. Fixed buttons live under desks and counters; wearable buttons travel as cards, fobs, watches and rings; app buttons live on a phone screen, often with gestures designed to work without looking.
What matters is less the button than three properties around it. Reachability: can it be pressed mid-confrontation, without unlocking anything, without looking? Silence: does pressing it stay invisible to the person causing the threat? And the response: who is on the other end, how fast, with what information. In the FY26 Duress data, deliberate presses reached a monitoring operator in a median of 7 seconds.
The failure mode to design against is the button nobody can reach. A phone in a bag, a fixed button behind an aggressor, a fob in a jacket in the car. This is why layered systems pair a button with automatic triggers - fall detection and timers that act when pressing is impossible.