How people actually call for help

When you design a safety device, you are really designing for a moment you cannot predict: the second a worker needs help. A year of monitoring data shows how that moment actually plays out - and it is more varied than most product pages admit.

The full breakdown

Across the 20,433 activations in the FY26 State of Lone Worker Safety report, here is how every alarm was raised:

• Device button press: 48.7% — a physical button, pressed deliberately.
• App gestures: 29.7% — slide-to-alert, triple-tap, on-screen SOS.
• Fall detection: 9.0% — automatic, no press.
• Missed check-in: 5.8% — automatic, a silence that escalated.
• Expired safety timer: 2.9% — automatic, a task timer that ran out.
• Integrations and other: 2.4%
• Phoenix button: 1.2% — the discreet card device.

Two things stand out. First, deliberate triggers - button and app - account for 78.4% of alarms. Most of the time, a worker knows they are in trouble and acts. Second, and more importantly, 17.7% of alarms were raised automatically - by a fall, a missed check-in, or an expired timer, when the worker could not or did not press anything.

What each trigger is for

The mix is not random. It maps onto different kinds of danger:

Deliberate triggers are for the danger you see coming. An escalating confrontation, a threatening visitor, a situation turning tense. The worker is conscious, aware, and able to act - what matters is that the trigger is reachable without a phone and silent so it does not provoke the aggressor. This is why button and card devices dominate in aggression-facing work.

Automatic triggers are for the danger that takes the worker out of the loop. A fall from height, a medical event, an assault that leaves them unable to press anything. Here the device itself has to notice - fall detection, or the absence of an expected check-in. Nearly one alarm in five in FY26 was raised this way.

Choosing for the mix

The practical lesson: do not choose a device for a single scenario. A button-only device has a blind spot for the worker who is knocked unconscious; an app-only setup has a blind spot for the worker who cannot reach their phone. The 17.7% of automatic alarms are, by definition, the ones where the obvious trigger failed.

The strongest deployments layer the triggers - a reachable manual button, plus automatic fall detection and timers - all routing to the same monitored response, so that whether the worker presses, gestures, falls, or simply goes quiet, the alarm still reaches a human in a median of seven seconds.

The full breakdown, response distribution and methodology are published in the FY26 report, free to cite with attribution.