The decision
Monitored vs unmonitored alarms.
A monitored alarm is answered by a trained operator at a staffed centre, around the clock; an unmonitored alarm notifies your own people and depends on them noticing. The fork matters most after hours, and in the incidents where the worker cannot respond. Here is the honest comparison.
What actually differs
| Monitored | Unmonitored (self-monitored) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers the alarm | A trained operator at a staffed, accredited centre, 24/7 | Whoever is on the notification list and awake |
| Response time | Measured and published (Duress median: 7 seconds) | Whenever someone sees the notification |
| After-hours and weekends | Identical cover around the clock | The riskiest hours are the least-watched |
| When the worker can't respond | Operator escalates to emergency services with location | An unanswered notification stays unanswered |
| Audit trail | Every step logged: timestamps, audio, decisions | Depends on the app; often just a notification log |
| Cost | A monthly per-user fee that includes the response | Lower, because the response is your own staff |
When self-monitoring is enough, and when it isn't
Self-monitoring is a legitimate choice when the risk is low, the work happens in business hours, and there is a genuinely staffed desk watching the alerts - a security operations centre, a dispatch room. If that describes your organisation, an unmonitored system with disciplined procedures can meet the duty of care.
It stops being defensible where the risk actually concentrates. In our FY26 monitoring data, 22% of activations happened after hours but 34% of confirmed emergencies did, and weekend alarms confirmed at a higher rate than weekday ones. Those are precisely the hours when a notification to a supervisor lands on a phone that is face-down on a bedside table.
The second failure mode is the incident with no follow-up press: a fall, a medical event, an assault that ends the worker's ability to respond. A monitored system treats an unanswered operator call as escalation grounds; an unmonitored system treats an unanswered notification as silence.