When someone works alone, somebody should know they're OK.

What a lone worker safety app is

A lone worker is anyone working out of sight and out of earshot of a colleague — a surveyor on a remote line, a tree crew member on the far side of a property, a rancher checking fence, a utility subcontractor at a rural pole, a guide who split the party at the trailhead. The hazard is rarely that the work is unusually dangerous. It is that an ordinary problem goes unnoticed for hours because nobody was expecting to hear from them.

Every product in this category is built from the same three mechanics, and everything else on a vendor's feature list is a variation on them. The differences that decide anything are who controls the sharing, and what the escalation is actually connected to at the far end — so it is worth knowing which of the three you are really buying:

• Location — where the person is, or where they last were, shared with the people who would go looking.
• Check-in — a periodic confirmation the worker sends, so that silence becomes a signal instead of an absence.
• Escalation — what happens when the confirmation does not arrive: who is told, by what channel, carrying what information.

How STALKR helps someone working alone

STALKR is organised around Crews rather than a company directory. A Crew is a small persistent group that is also a sharing scope: its members see each other on one map, and what you share with one Crew is not shared with another. For an owner-operator that maps onto the real shape of the day — the two people on a job are a Crew, and whoever is minding the phone at the shop is in it.

Nobody appears on that map by default. A member goes Live deliberately and can go Dark just as deliberately. That is the difference between a safety tool and a supervision tool, and in STALKR it is in the data model rather than in a policy document.

• Create a Crew and share the code. Membership is requested and then approved by an owner or admin — never assigned without the person asking.
• Each member chooses Live or Dark per Crew, so a work Crew and a family Crew stay genuinely separate.
• Arm a check-in timer for a task, or a repeating dead-man switch for a whole shift alone.
• Draw Zones around a yard, a site or a hazard and be told when someone enters or leaves.
• Press and hold SOS if something goes wrong while the phone is still in hand.

Live Crew location

Going Live publishes your current authorized position, facing direction, accuracy, status and battery into that Crew's scope. Members open one map and see everyone who is sharing, plus that Crew's Markers and Zones.

For working alone, the value is not watching a dot move. It is that when the check-in does not arrive, the person following up already knows which of four properties to drive to, and roughly where on it to start.

• Position, accuracy, status, and battery where the device reports it.
• A direction cone, shown only where the heading is trustworthy.
• Crew member trails, so the route travelled is visible rather than only the latest point.
• Approximate location, which shares an area instead of a point where the sharing mode or the operating system's accuracy requires it. It lowers precision — it is not anonymity, and authorized viewers still receive an area.
• Dark, which stops new fixes reaching that Crew. It is not a deletion: viewers keep the last position they already received, marked offline.
• Sharing a position needs a data connection. There is no satellite transport and no mesh networking, so out of coverage the map holds the last known position and says so.

Safety check-ins for working alone

A check-in is the cheapest safety control there is: the worker proves they are fine on a schedule, and the absence of that proof is what triggers everything else. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety describes exactly this pattern in its Working Alone fact sheet — a named primary and backup contact, a decided frequency, a written log, and an agreed procedure for a missed check-in.

In STALKR you arm a one-time check-in before a specific task, or a repeating dead-man timer for a whole shift.

• Choose an interval that matches the work rather than a vendor default.
• STALKR prompts you when a check-in is due; acknowledging resets the timer.
• Cancel the timer when you are back with people and it has stopped earning its keep.
• Creating, resolving, and escalating a timer all require service connectivity — this is not a local-only mechanism.
• Check-in timers and the dead-man switch are presented as a Pro capability in the app's subscription screen.

Missed check-in and dead-man alerts: the actual mechanism

This is the section to read closely, because escalation is where lone-worker products differ most and describe themselves least precisely.

When a check-in is missed, STALKR's servers escalate to your Crew and to the recipients you selected, by push notification and by email, carrying the last known location and the time. That is the entire mechanism, stated plainly:

• It is push and email. STALKR never sends an SMS on your behalf, and there is no telephone call and no automated voice dial.
• It does not contact police, ambulance, or any public emergency service. A person who receives the alert has to decide to act on it.
• It is not a monitoring centre. Nobody at NAVTRL is watching a screen — the alert reaches the people you named, and no one else.
• Escalation runs server-side, so it does not depend on the missing person's app being open. Background execution on iOS is never guaranteed regardless, and a force-quit stops ordinary background work.
• Delivery depends on notification permission, a valid push token, server configuration, and connectivity at the receiving end. Every intended responder needs notifications enabled.
• Recipients are chosen from the emergency contacts you save in the app, and you can change that list at any time.
• It is an aid, not a dispatch system. If someone is genuinely unreachable, the plan has to say who calls emergency services and when.

SOS, and exactly what it is scoped to

SOS is a deliberate press-and-hold on the map — deliberate so that a phone in a pocket cannot fire it. It creates a panic incident scoped to your active Crew and attempts to alert them.

It also opens a pre-filled message that you send yourself. STALKR does not send that message for you, and it does not reach emergency services. If the network request fails, the app reports that it could not reach the server rather than implying the Crew was told.

• Scoped to the active Crew — not to every Crew you belong to, and not to a call centre.
• Armed by a hold and cancellable before it completes.
• Recorded, so an incident can be reviewed afterwards.
• For genuine life-safety in country with no coverage, carry a device designed for it. STALKR is a coordination tool, not a substitute for a satellite beacon or a 911 call.

Zones around sites, yards, and hazards

A Zone is a Crew-scoped circle or polygon you draw on the map. It can be monitored, and it can alert the Crew when a member enters it or leaves it.

For a working-alone routine this is how a site becomes a checkpoint without anyone typing anything: leaving the yard, arriving at a remote block, stepping into a marked hazard area.

• Enter and Leave transitions are what a Zone alerts on. There is no dwell timer and no overstay alert.
• Monitoring and the enter/leave alert toggle are separate settings, and hiding the Zones layer changes drawing only — it does not disable monitoring.
• Background Zone evaluation uses iOS region monitoring and needs Always location permission. The operating system decides when that runs, which is why background location is still marked partial in STALKR's own feature status.
• Polygon Zones and Zone alerts require Pro in the current plan matrix.

Safety history you can look back through

Crew events, Zone transitions, marker arrivals, Journeys, check-ins and SOS incidents land in an in-app activity and notification history and stay there after the banner is gone. It is how you reconstruct what happened and when, instead of relying on somebody's memory of a phone buzzing in a truck.

Be clear about what that is not. It is an in-app history — not a compliance export, not a report you can hand to a regulator or an insurer, and not a supervisor-facing audit trail. Notifications and activity are recorded as PARTIAL in STALKR's feature status: the operating system can suppress a notification, and a missing push token or server configuration prevents remote delivery.

Live, stale, last-known — the truth the map tells

The most dangerous thing a lone-worker map can do is draw a confident dot for a phone that stopped reporting forty minutes ago. STALKR labels what it knows instead of smoothing over what it does not.

• Live — the position is current.
• Stale — a position exists but it is old, and it is drawn as stale rather than as though it were now.
• Unknown — STALKR does not know where the member is, and says so.
• Offline after Dark — the member deliberately stopped publishing, and viewers keep only the last position they were already given.
• A direction cone appears only when the heading is trustworthy; where it is not, the cone is omitted rather than guessed.
• Those labels appear on the map. There is no separate low-signal alarm that fires by itself when a member goes quiet — the check-in timer is the mechanism that turns silence into a notification, which is exactly why a lone worker should arm one.

Privacy, consent, and worker control

A working-alone programme that the crew resents gets defeated: phones left in trucks, the app force-quit, timers ignored. Consent is not a nicety here — it is what keeps the safety mechanism alive on a wet Tuesday in month seven.

STALKR's answer is that sharing is scoped and the person sharing holds the switch.

• Sharing is per Crew, never global. A work Crew sees work, and it does not see the weekend.
• Live and Dark are chosen per Crew by the person sharing, not once for the whole account.
• Approximate location shares an area rather than a point. It lowers precision — it is not anonymity.
• Any member can leave a Crew at any time, which ends that Crew's access to them.
• Tracking Enforced is a Pro admin control that keeps every member of one Crew — the owner included — Live until the owner turns enforcement off. It is a Crew rule the whole Crew can see, it cannot manufacture a position if location permission is denied, and it cannot stop someone leaving the Crew.
• Location permission belongs to the device and the operating system. No STALKR setting overrides it.

What STALKR does not provide

Read this before you decide rather than after. These are real gaps, and for some working-alone programmes they are disqualifying — which is a reasonable outcome and better learned now.

• No supervisor or web dashboard. Everything happens in the iOS app; there is no browser console for a manager or a safety officer.
• No professional or 24-7 monitoring centre. Alerts reach the people you named, and nobody at NAVTRL is watching.
• No man-down or fall detection. STALKR does not sense impact, tilt, or non-movement, and it raises no alarm on its own if someone collapses.
• No recurring scheduled check-ins on a roster. You arm a timer per task or per shift; STALKR does not run a shift calendar for a workforce.
• No configurable escalation policy. Escalation is push and email to the Crew and your chosen recipients — there is no tiered rules engine, no on-call rotation, and no voice-call fallback.
• No compliance export or reporting. There is an in-app history and there is no CSV, PDF, or audit report to hand to a regulator or an insurer.
• No enterprise provisioning, SSO, or workforce administration. People join a Crew with a code and an approval, one at a time.
• No regulatory certification of any kind, and no claim that using STALKR makes anyone compliant with anything.
• No public App Store release and no Android release. STALKR is an iOS TestFlight beta, so every person you need on the map needs an iPhone.
• No offline map downloads and no offline-first sync. Sharing, escalation, and Zone alerts all need a data connection.
• No Garmin, inReach, or satellite integration, and no radio or mesh link. A phone with coverage is the requirement.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

STALKR fits an owner-operator with two to twenty people who already trust each other and need to stop losing track of one another during the day.

• Guides and outfitters splitting a party across a drainage.
• Survey crews working separate lines out of one truck.
• Forestry and tree crews on properties with no line of sight.
• Ranch and agricultural work — fence lines, water checks, back paddocks.
• Utility subcontractors covering rural assets alone.
• Hunters, hikers, outdoor groups, and families who want the same accounting without the same surveillance.
• Look elsewhere if you need a manager's dashboard, a monitored alarm receiving centre, fall detection, or a compliance report. Those are different products, and STALKR does not pretend to be one of them.

How this differs from employee tracking software

Lone worker safety and employee GPS tracking look similar on a feature list and are opposite in design intent. One exists so that somebody notices when a worker stops being accounted for. The other exists so that a manager knows where staff are.

STALKR is deliberately built for the first, and we decline the second. That decision has consequences you can inspect rather than take on trust:

• Sharing is opt-in per Crew and the worker holds the switch. Dark is always available to them.
• There is no admin console showing a workforce, because there is no workforce model — only Crews whose members can all see themselves in them.
• Crew member trails show a travelled route to everyone in the Crew, the same view the worker has. There is no manager-only history report.
• Membership is approved rather than assigned: an administrator cannot add someone who did not ask to join.
• A Crew's members are visible to each other as members. A Journey's watchers are people the traveller chose for that one trip.
• Tracking Enforced is the single control that constrains a member's sharing. It is a visible Crew rule, and leaving the Crew is always possible.

Working-alone programme considerations

STALKR can support elements of a working-alone safety programme. It is not the programme, and no app is one.

Requirements differ by country, province or state, and industry, and nothing here is legal advice — check what applies to you with your own regulator. Below are the authorities worth reading before choosing any tool, and then the division of labour between the tool and you:

• UK Health and Safety Executive — Protecting lone workers: how to manage the risks of working alone, INDG73(rev4). hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg73.htm
• Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety — Working Alone - General, OSH Answers fact sheet. ccohs.ca/oshanswers/hsprograms/workingalone.html
• US OSHA — 29 CFR 1915.84, titled Working alone, which requires employers in shipyard employment to account for a lone employee by sight or verbal communication at intervals appropriate to the assignment and again at the end of the assignment or the shift. osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1915/1915.84
• What a tool can carry: the check-in interval, the named recipients, the position, and a record of what was sent and when.
• What no tool carries for you: the hazard assessment, the training, the decision about who responds, and the obligation to make that decision.

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