Help & Guide

A practical walkthrough of what the app does and how to set it up. Short on details? See the FAQ.

Before your first session

Two things are worth doing before you rely on the app for real:

• Add at least one emergency contact (Contacts screen) — the app has no one to notify without this. Your first contact is treated as the primary one and also gets an automatic phone call, not just a text, if you enable that in Settings.
• Grant the permissions the app asks for as you go — Location and SMS are required to start most sessions; the app will block starting one and tell you exactly what's missing rather than fail silently later. Everything else (Camera, Phone calls, Bluetooth, notifications, physical activity) is optional and only needed for the specific features that use it.

Picking an activity

The Home screen's activity picker is where every session starts. Most entries — Bike, Motorcycle, Run, Walk, Hike, Car, and water activities (kayak/canoe) — track a real GPS route, speed, distance, and elevation, and watch your phone's motion sensors for a possible crash or fall. Three entries work differently:

• Check-in — no motion or location tracking at all, just a periodic "still OK?" prompt at whatever interval you choose. Good for situations where GPS tracking would be pointless or awkward (a solo hike where you just want to be checked on, working alone, etc.).
• Gym — no motion or location tracking either, for workouts where your phone sits on a bench, not on your body. Instead of a periodic prompt, you confirm "I'm OK" yourself with a tap any time; a running 15-minute window resets each time you do. Pair a heart-rate sensor and a sustained abnormal reading can also trigger the alert automatically.
• Guardian — pairs your phone with someone else's over Bluetooth so each of you can tell the other is still nearby, with an alert if contact is lost. Unlike Check-in/Gym, it does record your own GPS route in the background while paired — just never shares it with your paired partner. See below.

How crash detection works

During a tracked session, the app watches the accelerometer and gyroscope for a sudden spike — the kind produced by a fall or impact — and cross-checks it against a sharp drop in GPS speed. When both line up, it shows a countdown (30 seconds by default) with a big I'm OK button. If you tap it, nothing else happens. If the countdown runs out, the app:

• Sends an SMS to every emergency contact you've configured, with your location.
• Automatically calls your primary (first) contact, if you've turned that on in Settings.
• Optionally attaches photos taken from your phone's camera, if you've turned that on too.
• Scans for nearby Bluetooth devices right after the crash and again about 90–105 seconds later, so — if you're later found and someone's looking into what happened — there's a record of what else was nearby (e.g. another vehicle) at the time.

If a message doesn't seem to go through (no signal at the moment), it's retried automatically once you have signal again, at a resend interval you can adjust in Settings.

Sessions without GPS

Some activities happen where GPS doesn't work well or at all — a treadmill, an indoor track. Run and Walk sessions can turn off GPS tracking, switching distance/pace estimation to your phone's built-in step counter, using a stride length estimated from your height (set once in Settings). If you pair a Bluetooth treadmill instead, the app reads its actual speed/distance directly, which is more accurate than the step counter. Car and Motorcycle sessions can also run GPS-free, but without a step counter or treadmill equivalent to fall back on — they just track duration, with crash/fall detection from motion sensors alone and no distance or pace.

Crash/fall detection still runs in every GPS-free mode — it just relies on motion sensors alone, without the GPS-speed-drop cross-check used in a normal GPS session.

Pairing sensors

From Settings, you can pair Bluetooth accessories the app will reconnect to automatically on future sessions:

• Heart-rate sensor — recorded during any session, and works the same way as a safety signal in every one of them, not just workouts: a sustained abnormal reading (based on your age and resting heart rate, both set in Settings) triggers its own alert whether you're on a Bike/Run, driving a Car, on a Check-in, or in Guardian mode. In Gym mode specifically, it also backs up the manual "I'm OK" button with an automatic check.
• Cadence sensor — recorded during a session, shown in your session summary's charts.
• Treadmill — used instead of the step counter for GPS-free Run/Walk distance and pace, when connected.

You can keep several sensors of each kind: ones you paired earlier stay in a list, so you can switch between them without scanning again, and "Forget" removes one. Tap a sensor's name to give it a name of your own. If the active sensor stays silent during a session, the app briefly looks for your other saved sensors and offers to switch to one that is nearby.

Resetting the app

Settings → Reset has two options. Reset all settings restores the defaults and keeps your data, pairings and connections. Factory data reset erases everything the app stores on your phone — sessions, routes, contacts, settings, pairings and keys — and cannot be undone; it asks you to type a word and confirm with your screen lock first.

Guardian mode

Guardian mode pairs two phones over Bluetooth (a "Guardian" and their Ward) so each can tell the other is still nearby, without either phone sharing live GPS location with the other — the only thing exchanged is a short-range Bluetooth signal confirming proximity.

• Pairing is a one-time setup from Settings; a Ward's phone can be paired with more than one Guardian at once, each tracked independently, and a paired Guardian can watch more than one person by switching between them.
• Once broadcasting is on (a standing Settings toggle, or just for a single session), losing Bluetooth contact starts a countdown — same as crash detection — before the Ward's own emergency contacts are notified automatically.
• A false alarm (you're actually together, phones just lost range) is a single tap to dismiss, and doesn't end the pairing — no need to re-pair afterward.
• While a standing pairing is active (not the single-session option below), both phones record their own GPS route locally for the duration — used to mark roughly where contact was last confirmed if it's lost. This route is never sent to the other phone or anywhere else; it's a completely separate thing from the "no live location shared" Bluetooth proximity check above.
• Turning off broadcasting, removing a pairing, or revoking access for everyone all require confirming it's you via your phone's own lock screen first, so someone else holding your unlocked phone can't silently disable it.

Full technical detail on exactly what's exchanged and when is in the Privacy Policy (§9).

Push notifications without Google (optional)

If you turn on Guardian mode's remote location sharing ("Allow a Guardian to see your far location" — see above), your Guardian's phone needs some way to receive that location the instant it's sent. By default this goes through Google/Firebase Cloud Messaging — but if your phone doesn't have Google Play Services (GrapheneOS, or another de-Googled build), or you'd simply rather not depend on Google for this, Settings offers two alternatives:

• UnifiedPush, with your own distributor app — if you already have a UnifiedPush distributor installed (e.g. ntfy), the app registers with it automatically once you select UnifiedPush in Settings' push-notification picker.
• UnifiedPush, with Incident Detection's own built-in distributor — no separate app install needed at all. Pick "Incident Detection (internal)" from the same UnifiedPush picker, and the app talks directly to our own relay over an encrypted connection, acting as its own distributor. This is the simplest option if you don't already use UnifiedPush for anything else.

To set it up: open Settings → Google Services tab → Push notifications, tap the UnifiedPush choice, and pick either your installed distributor or "Incident Detection (internal)" from the list that appears. There's also a third, non-push option — Direct — which checks for new updates periodically instead of receiving them the instant they arrive; pick that only if you'd rather avoid a standing connection altogether and accept a short delay. Leaving the picker on Auto always prefers Google/Firebase first, and only falls back to UnifiedPush or Direct when Google's service genuinely isn't available on your phone — so most people never need to touch this at all.

Whichever option you pick, only one is ever active at a time, and none of them change what's sent — just how it travels. Full detail on what each option exposes to whom is in the Privacy Policy (§3/§9a).

Session history & export

Every finished session is saved to your history, with a warning icon on any where an incident alert was triggered. A session's summary screen shows its route (if it had one) and pace/heart-rate/cadence charts (if recorded), and lets you export it as a GPX file (or FIT, for a GPS-free session) to share to another app like Garmin Connect — or, if you've connected a Strava account in Settings, upload it directly.

Testing the alert flow

Settings has a "Test notification system" button — no need to start a session first. Tapping it checks that everything a real alert depends on is actually in place (emergency contacts, SMS/location permission, and so on); if something's missing, it tells you what before letting you continue.

Once everything checks out, it asks you to confirm before doing anything. The test itself is real, not a mock — it mirrors exactly what a real alert would do with your current settings: it sends an actual SMS to your emergency contacts (clearly marked as a test, not identical to a real alert), and if you've enabled auto-call, places a real call to your primary contact too, and if you've enabled MMS photos, attaches a real photo the same way a real alert would. It's worth running once so you know it actually works — just give your contacts a heads-up first.

If you see a warning banner

A live session shows a banner if something would stop an alert from working right now — most often no cellular signal (the app watches your phone's service state, if you've granted the optional Phone State permission), or a permission that's been revoked since the session started. Tap it for detail on what's wrong and, where there's actually something to fix (a permission), a shortcut to Settings.

Getting more help

Check the FAQ first — most specific questions (battery use, data handling, what a given permission is for) are answered there. Anything else: support@incident-detection.com.