Two kinds of danger

Every industry says the same thing in procurement: “our workers face risk.” A year of monitoring data says the more useful question is which kind.

For the FY26 State of Lone Worker Safety report, we classified activations by organisation type and looked at how each sector’s alarms were raised - by a worker pressing something, or by the system noticing something. The split is dramatic:

• Retail: 3.8% of activations were automatic. The rest were a worker deliberately triggering an alarm.
• Healthcare: 8.6% automatic.
• Community services: 26.6% automatic.
• Government: 37.0% automatic.

Same platform, same devices available - and a tenfold difference in how sectors use them.

Danger you can see, and danger nobody sees

The split maps onto two fundamentally different risk shapes.

Aggression risk is a person in front of you: the escalating customer, the volatile visitor at reception. It announces itself in the moment, and the worker knows before any system does. Retail lives here, which is why retail alarms are button presses - immediate, deliberate, mid-incident. What matters is that the trigger works instantly, silently, and without needing a phone in hand.

Isolation risk is the absence of anyone at all: the solo home visit, the housing inspection, the after-hours site check. The dangerous scenario is precisely the one where the worker cannot raise an alarm - so the system has to carry the load. Government and community organisations run on safety timers and welfare check-ins: a quarter to a third of their alarms are the system speaking because the worker went quiet.

Healthcare sits between the two, which fits: aggression risk in facilities, isolation risk in the community workforce.

Why this matters when you’re buying

Most safety-system evaluations compare feature lists. The trigger data suggests a better first question: which of the two dangers dominates your work?

• If it’s aggression, weight the trigger. Wearables that fire without a phone, one-press activation, silence, live audio and video to the responder. Timer features will sit mostly unused - as retail’s 3.8% shows.
• If it’s isolation, weight the automation. Frictionless timers, missed check-in escalation, fall detection - and a response that treats a system-raised alarm exactly as seriously as a pressed button. In our data both route to the same monitoring centre with the same 7-second median pickup, because a silence at 9pm deserves the same urgency as a button at noon.
• Most organisations have both, in different roles. The rostered store team and the mobile assessor need different halves of the same platform - which is an argument for one system that does both, configured per role, rather than a point solution per risk.

The full dataset and methodology are in the FY26 report, free to cite with attribution. Sector figures are shown as rates, classified by organisation type, so no individual customer or region is identifiable.