Will Solomon, Chief Technology Officer at Peoplesafe, speaks exclusively to SJUK about how the world of personal safety is changing.
Personal safety is about an individual feeling free from harm – whether that’s physical, emotional or psychological – in their everyday lives.
The key word to hone in on there is feel. Personal safety isn’t determined by completing a day at work or a journey home without anything happening.
If someone feels unsafe or threatened at any point, their personal safety has been impacted.
In a survey conducted by Peoplesafe with over 2,000 employees, personal safety is a weekly concern for a fifth of people.
Extrapolated out to the UK workforce, that’s 6.8 million individuals worrying about their personal safety every week.
First of all, it’s fantastic to work for a company pioneering tech for good. Peoplesafe’s mission is to be ‘trusted by employers to protect their employees and keep them safe.’
Delivering that mission is achieved by providing technology solutions that enable every employee to perform their role safely.
Peoplesafe is the largest personal safety service provider with market-leading software and infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands of users.
When I joined, the award-winning Nexus management portal had recently been launched alongside bespoke alarm handling software, Lighthouse, and a custom-built fulfilment system.
All the foundations had been laid to enable the business to take advantage of an opportunity in the market to educate employers about how they could be protecting the personal safety of their staff more effectively.
It’s changing in tandem with how the world is changing.
It’s quite a volatile time at the moment with high levels of uncertainty.
Each year, we witness record-breaking crime statistics, with violent crime rates surging by more than a third in the last decade.
As we saw in July 2024, riots across the UK were sparked because of the horrific events in Stockport.
Similar fatalities, particularly of women in recent history, have raised people’s consciousness of their own personal safety.
The result of this is that there’s an increased demand for easy-to-use tech solutions to make people feel safer in their everyday lives.
From our research, we found that 60% of people have safety concerns on their commute.
Although there isn’t a legal duty on employers to provide protection during these journeys, there is a growing demand for safety measures to extend beyond working hours.
Over half of people we surveyed (51%) thought that employers had a duty of care beyond working hours.
Evolution of technology is also shaping the world of personal safety.
We are becoming more and more reliant on technology to help us feel safer whether we’re at home, at work or out socialising.
Technology has long been used to increase personal safety and provide peace of mind to users and their loved ones.
Dedicated personal safety technology – which is already available in the form of apps or devices – tends to have three key features:
After this, solutions start to get more sophisticated to tackle specific situations.
A common example would be fall detection technology that triggers an alarm when the app or device senses the user has fallen which helps to cover slips and trips as well.
We’ve recently been developing our fall detection solution to recognise when someone is working at height in a harness, undertaking extensive testing with the Tetra system.
What we’ve learned from our wider research is that a large proportion of people feel a threat to their personal safety when commuting or making journeys.
We developed Travelsafe to address this critical gap in employee safety, recognising that travel is a source of fear and anxiety for many, raising the standard for commuter safety.
This solution calculates a timer for the expected journey time.
If the user fails to arrive by the ETA, an automatic alert is triggered to the Peoplesafe control centre.
By integrating real-time journey monitoring, welfare checks and instant access to professional support, we’ve created a tool that prioritises personal safety and provides peace of mind for employees, wherever they are.
As organisations increasingly adopt new technology, integration into existing systems is becoming essential.
The rise of APIs is enabling personal safety technology to seamlessly integrate into workplace systems, making it a natural part of everyday business operations.
Think about onboarding a new starter.
We’ve developed an API from our user management portal, Nexus, to some of the largest HR systems such as Workday and Oracle.
When the new starter is created in the organisation’s HR system, they can be auto created in ours.
Nexus can also integrate with field team schedulers, seamlessly starting and stopping enhanced protection when the user requires it, without needing to interact with our service or take any additional steps.
Within personal safety technology, the integration of AI and machine learning has the opportunity to significantly enhance personal safety management.
By harnessing large volumes of data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices and wearables, AI can identify real-time risks and quickly detect patterns or trends that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Through this analysis, AI can provide insights that help employers make proactive decisions about safety protocols.
For example, AI could alert employers about specific locations or times where incidents are more likely to occur, allowing organisations to implement targeted safety measures and reduce the likelihood of accidents before they happen.
This would shift the focus from simply responding to incidents to preventing them. How companies implement these technologies will be crucial to their success.
Peoplesafe’s AI strategy is rooted in information protection, so while we are building these incredibly insightful tools, we continue to work within a strict data security framework.
Further advancements in personal safety technology will reshape how organisations protect their workforce and boost employee wellbeing.
Enhanced connectivity is set to be a pivotal factor. With the rollout of 5G and satellite networks, improved connectivity will empower organisations to provide real-time support and updates to their workforce, regardless of location.
This will be particularly beneficial for employees who may face safety risks while working in isolated areas.
One of the most promising areas for future development is the deeper integration of personal safety services with third party devices.
For example, smartwatches can already detect medical emergencies, such as identifying heart attacks by monitoring abnormal heart rate patterns, so it’s likely that this ability will continue to evolve.
By integrating devices like the Apple Watch or dash cameras with Peoplesafe, we could detect emergencies such as crashes or medical events in real time, enabling a faster, more accurate response.
Beyond immediate emergencies, future iterations could monitor a user’s post-incident vitals, such as decreased activity levels in the days following an incident.
This data could serve as an early warning sign, prompting wellbeing checks to ensure the user’s recovery is on track.
There is an increasing recognition that safety goes beyond just protecting physical health; it includes the overall wellbeing of workers.
This shift suggests that future developments will begin to monitor mental health and employee wellness, as well as physical safety.
Personal safety solutions are expected to begin to track factors like fatigue, stress levels and employees’ feelings of safety.
This emphasis on mental health reflects a broader understanding that employee wellbeing is crucial for a productive and engaged workforce.
This article was originally published in the March 2025 Edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.
