LassieBot is a personal safety device for people who venture alone into the wild, and for seniors or others living alone where others might not notice their absence. LassieBot monitors the gyroscope and sends out SMS alerts to your emergency contacts when the device hasn't been moved for a long time.
Free for all uses with attribution requested.
Emergency contacts are identified by adding the four character "ICE:" prefix to the names of people in user's contacts. ICE stands for "In Case of Emergency" and is often looked for by emergency responders, so even if someone never uses LassieBot, they are making themselves safer by properly identifying good emergency contacts this way. NOTE: The colon in the prefix is important to LassiBot, so if you want to keep someone as an emergency contact but not have them contacted by LassieBot, just don't include the colon. When the "Refresh" button is clicked, LassieBot will search for all your emergency contacts and list them all.
When there is at least one such ICE contact, LassieBot will enable the main button. Clicking it will turn on LassieBot, and if the displayed number of hours elapses without detecting phone motion, then an alert SMS will be sent to all the listed contacts. During the last few seconds before sending alerts, LassieBot will make a lot of noise and vibrations, giving you a chance to move the phone and cancel the alerts.
It is important to test LassieBot so that you will know what it will do. If you are using this to protect yourself, the first thing you should do is talk with all potential emergency contacts you are considering using. You don't want to surprise someone with a scary message, even if you have a very close relationship with them and are certain that they will accept the responsibility. Let them know that this means that it may result in LassieBot alerts which may be real emergencies or false alarms. They may also get phone calls from emergency responders looking for help in deciding which hospitals to take you to, etc.
In the case of LassieBot alerts, your contacts should immediately attempt to call you back to find out if it is a real emergency. If they cannot reach you, they should begin calling other people and trying to track you down. It is obviously a big responsibility for anyone to accept, so please do this carefully and considerably.
For testing, it is best to have all the ICE contacts and their devices in the same room. Turn on LassieBot, open the "Configure & Test" section, and press the "Send Test Alert" button. Everyone in the contacts list should get an alert. Once that is successful, it may be a good idea to test the actual way by turning down the time-out limit to one hour, turning on LassieBot again, setting the phone down and leaving it untouched for one hour until the alert goes off automatically. This time you will hear the loud countdown timer at the end and you can test the ability to cancel the alert by simply picking up the phone if you like. Once everyone is very certain about how it works and what to do, just select an appropriate timeout length and simply leave LassieBot on.
When turned on, LassieBot will not allow your phone to sleep, otherwise it could not work. This will definitely drain your battery faster than normal. LassieBot is a free app, so just consider the frequent charging to be the price that you pay for the protection.
One configuration option is the "Off when charging" check box. When checked, this will disable alerts while your phone is charging, allowing you to select a smaller number of time-out hours for greater safety but at the risk of an actual emergency while sleeping or otherwise charging.
By Melinda Green with special thanks to Don Hatch for finding several important bugs.
By using LassieBot, you agree to accept all risk including false alarms, real alarms not sent, bugs in the software. Incorrect or misleading documentation, battery drain, and all other consequences, intentional or otherwise. You agree to hold harmless, Melinda Green, Superliminal Software, and anyone associated in any way with this project.