1 in 6 alarms was raised by nobody

Every duress system is designed around a moment: the worker presses the button, help comes. It’s the moment on the marketing pages, the moment in the training video, the moment procurement evaluates.

The data says a meaningful share of real alarms don’t happen that way.

The alarms nobody pressed

In the FY26 State of Lone Worker Safety report - every activation logged by the Duress monitoring centre across a full year - 17.7% of the 20,433 activations were raised automatically. No button, no slide-to-alert, no deliberate act. The system noticed something and raised the alarm on the worker’s behalf:

• Fall detection: 9.0% of all activations. The device detected a fall or hard impact followed by stillness.
• Missed check-ins: 5.8%. A worker didn’t confirm they were safe when prompted, and the silence escalated.
• Expired safety timers: 2.9%. A worker set a timer around a task - a home visit, a walk to the car - and didn’t clear it.

For comparison, deliberate button presses on devices accounted for 48.7% of activations, and app gestures for 29.7%. The automatic triggers are not a rounding error. They are the third-largest way alarms happen.

Why this matters for system design

The uncomfortable design question is: what does your safety system do when the worker can’t act?

A confrontation that turns physical in seconds. A fall from a ladder. A medical event alone in a stairwell. These are precisely the scenarios lone worker systems exist for, and they’re also the scenarios where reaching for a device - any device - may be impossible. A system that only listens for a button press has a blind spot exactly where the stakes are highest.

Automatic triggers close that blind spot, but only if two things are true:

1. They’re switched on and worn. Fall detection in a drawer detects nothing. This is an argument for form factors people actually wear all shift - and for making check-ins and timers frictionless enough that workers use them on ordinary days, not just risky ones.
2. Something happens when they fire. An automatic trigger that lands in an unwatched dashboard has the same blind spot, one step later. In the Duress system, an expired timer or detected fall raises an activation exactly like a pressed button: same monitoring centre, same 7-second median pickup, same trained operator with location on screen.

The false-alarm bargain, again

Automatic triggers raise more false alarms than buttons do - a dropped device, a forgotten timer. Across all activations in FY26, 93% resolved as false alarms or de-escalated without needing emergency services, and the automatic categories contribute their share of that number.

We consider that the deal, not the flaw. A system tuned to only fire when it’s certain is a system that eventually stays silent when it mattered. The false-alarm rate is the premium; the 815 confirmed emergencies - including the ones nobody was able to press a button for - are what it buys.

Three questions for your current setup

1. If a worker goes down and can’t move, when does anyone find out? If the answer depends on someone noticing an absence, measure how long that actually takes on a quiet Friday evening.
2. Do your workers use timers and check-ins on ordinary days? Tools reserved for “risky” visits protect nobody, because risk doesn’t announce itself. Usage data tells you the truth here.
3. Where do automatic alerts land? A monitored centre, or a dashboard that assumes someone is watching? The monitored response question matters twice as much for alarms nobody pressed - there’s no worker on the other end to escalate by phone.

The full breakdown - trigger types, response-time distribution, after-hours patterns, methodology - is in the FY26 report. Free to cite with attribution.