How it works

MyHelpGroup stands on four legs — you ask, the phone notices, the schedule asks, the night listens — and all four reach the same people: your group. This page says what each one does, and where each one stops.

① The button you press

It is on the main screen, and it is the whole of it: one button.

Press it and a countdown starts. Five seconds, with a cancel button, because a pocket and a grandchild both press buttons. Let it run out and everyone in your group is told.

There are two intensities, and they ask different things of the people who answer:

• Alert — I need someone. Each person confirms they have seen it.
• Emergency — now. Each person walks the three steps: seen it, on my way, arrived.

② The phone notices by itself

The button needs a hand. This part is for when you have not got one: a fall down the stairs, a car crash, a moment when you can shout but not reach the screen.

Seven sensors, and you choose which. Every one of them is off when you install the app — nothing watches you until you say so:

No sensor sends anything on its own. Each one opens the same five seconds the button opens, with the same CANCEL underneath — because a phone dropped on a hard floor and a person falling look alike to a sensor. The five seconds are there so the difference is yours to make.

And no sensor is a promise. A phone in a coat on the back seat may miss a crash; a phone knocked off a table may report one. That is why they are off until you turn them on, why each one is separate, and why none of them shortens the five seconds.

③ The schedule asks

This is the part that works when you cannot ask for anything.

What you set

Per weekday: whether the schedule runs at all, the window it runs in — say 08:00 to 22:00 — and how often it asks inside that window.

The times belong to the schedule’s own time zone, not to wherever the phone happens to be. You set it once; a trip does not move your check-ins, and does not wake anyone at four in the morning.

The cycle

The exact numbers

Answering

The screen lights up over the lock screen and shows one button. Sound and vibration are yours to choose — none, a notification, or an alarm. One touch and it is quiet until the next time.

Pausing

A hospital, a flight, a weekend away: you can pause the check-ins for 1 to 48 hours without switching the schedule off. The app tells you when they come back, and which check-in is the first one after the pause. When the time is up they resume by themselves; there is nothing to remember.

What your group is told

They get an alert saying you did not answer a safety check-in. It arrives like any other alert — they confirm it, and whoever is nearest goes.

What it cannot do

The phone is what asks. A phone that is switched off, out of battery, or left at home does not ask, and nothing happens. This is a phone app, not a sensor in your house.

④ The night listens

You switch the monitor on when you want it; it is a button, not a schedule.

It needs three things: permission to use the microphone, at least one word that you chose yourself, and the phone near you. Without a word of yours it does not start — there is nothing to listen for.

On the charger the screen stays on, dimmed to its lowest: visible proof that it is listening. Off the charger the screen goes dark and it keeps listening.

Two things call your group: one of your words, or a shout.

Nothing is recorded and nothing is kept. What leaves the phone, if one of your words is heard, is the same alert the button sends.

Where the sound goes. The phone turns what it hears into words by itself: with Android’s on-device recognition, or — where your phone or your language has no model for it — with an offline pack you download once. Neither of them sends the sound anywhere, so it never leaves the phone. The privacy policy says the same in the language of the law.

Your group

Whoever creates the group is its master — the person the group exists for. Everyone invited is support.

Each person has a code in their own app. You invite by that code; they accept or decline, and see what they are accepting before they do. Nobody joins a group without saying yes, and nobody sees anything about you until something happens.

If you install the app on another phone of yours, the same invitations are there. They belong to you, not to one phone.

When your group is called

Everyone is told at once, in seconds, with their screens off. The alert lights the screen and sounds as an alarm rather than as a notification — so a phone that has been silenced still makes a sound.

Your position travels with the alert, so the people coming can navigate to you instead of guessing.

Anyone in the group can close the message when it is over, and closing it stops the alert on everyone’s phone at once. A closed message is not deleted — it stays in the list, and it can be reopened if it turns out not to be over.

What the phone has to allow

Android switches apps off to save battery. That is right for most apps and wrong for this one, so the app asks for four things that look unusual. Each one has a single reason:

• No battery restrictions — a frozen app cannot ask at the time you set it to ask.
• Exact alarms — so the check-in happens at the minute you chose, not whenever the system next feels like waking things up.
• Full-screen notifications — so the check-in can light a locked screen instead of waiting quietly in the list of notifications.
• Appear over other apps — so the check-in reaches the front while you are using something else. Without it the alert still arrives, as a strip at the top of the screen.

The app works without any of them. It works worse, and late. Nothing here is used for anything other than what this page describes — what is collected and where it goes is written out in the privacy policy.