Farmer Lone Worker Safety App

The app

The Farmer Lone Worker Safety app was created to address a health and safety gap that I became aware of because of my work with the IKnowFood project. Briefly, the app aims to provide some level of protection to those who work alone and don’t currently mitigate the risks involved. For a more detailed background to it have a look at this previous post which covers the inception of the Farmer Lone Worker Safety app.

Availability

The Farmer Lone Worker Safety app is now live on the Play Store and is available to anyone using Android who wants to use it.

Unfortunately, It’s not currently available on iPhones, as we didn’t have the resources to do this. If you own an iPhone and want to use the app, add a comment at the bottom of this post or email me as knowing that there is an interest is an important part of making an app. If myself and others don’t know that there is an interest, we won’t be able to get the resources to build it.

What if I’m not a farmer?

The app was developed to help farmers who work alone in sheds and barns, but the app can be used by anyone.

If automatically sending out an emergency message to others at your farm/workshop/garage/home/etc when you are motionless for too long or press an on-screen emergency button sounds like it would be a benefit, please download and use the app.

Why is it free?

Because it can be.

The farmers involved in the IKnowFood project gave up their time for free to try and help progress the state of the agricultural sector and the researchers involved were paid by public money through research grants. It seemed only fair that we should make the output of this research (the Farmer Lone Worker Safety app) available to everyone for as little as possible, which at this point is free. If the app becomes very popular, there may, in the future, be a small yearly cost to cover the technical costs of providing the app’s functionality, if these couldn’t be supported through corporate sponsorships.

Ultimately, the IKnowFood research project and research in general, is done to obtain knowledge which sometimes can then be used to do something better.

The research conducted showed us that there was a need and what a solution could look like.

Sometimes non-scientists don’t see the tangible results of research and in other cases, (like this one) there is a more direct output. Either way, we all paid for the research and so should all benefit.

With research and the sciences, the scales and timeframes don’t matter, what matters is the joint pursuit of the best way forwards. In this instance, the Farmer Lone Worker Safety app looks to be a better way of working alone for some and so, we’ve made it available to as wide an audience as possible.

We hope that it will be a benefit and lay the foundation for new ideas and innovations.