Monitored alarm response

Monitored alarm response means duress activations route to a staffed, professionally run monitoring centre 24/7, rather than to a dashboard, an email inbox, or an on-call manager.

The response model is the biggest hidden difference between lone-worker systems. Two products with identical buttons can behave completely differently at 2am: one surfaces the alert on a dashboard nobody is watching; the other puts a trained operator on the case with the worker's location, audio and video in front of them. The Duress monitoring centre's median pickup is 7 seconds, measured across every activation in FY26.

Accreditation is how you verify the claim. Independent gradings - ASIAL grading in Australia, NSI Gold and BS 8484 in the UK, EN 50518 in Europe - audit a centre's staffing, redundancy, and procedures. A vendor who self-describes as '24/7 monitored' without naming an accreditation is asking you to take their word for it.

The honest trade-off: professional monitoring answers everything, including false alarms - 93% of activations in FY26 resolved as false alarms or de-escalated without needing emergency services, and every one was answered anyway. That is the price of never missing the real one.

Common questions

What should I ask a monitoring vendor?

Three questions: What is your median time from activation to a human operator? Which independent accreditation does the monitoring centre hold? Is 24/7 monitoring included as standard, or an optional tier? Specific numbers and named accreditations are the tell.

Is self-monitoring ever enough?

For genuinely low-risk roles with informed sign-off, possibly. For aggression-facing or after-hours work, the data argues against it: after-hours alarms are roughly twice as likely to be real emergencies, and dashboards are at their least-watched exactly then.

Monitored alarm response

Common questions

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See what a 7-second response looks like for your team.