Safety App Of The Week

August 5, 2013 No Comments

Below is our “Safety App of the Week”.  These weekly features are published every Monday.  New apps are tested on Apple iPads and rated from ♥ to ♥♥♥♥♥ (♥♥♥♥♥ is the best).  Prior app of the week articles are archived here.

Working Alone

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Official Description  

“This App was developed specifically for the Oil and Gas Industry, however it can be used for lots of other industries or uses – especially when you want to know where your employee’s are.

The Working Alone App allows field workers to keep their Supervisors up to date as to their situation when they are traveling around remote locations on their own.

One of the main advantages of the Working App is that it allows you to set up emails ahead of time, so that when you arrive at your location, you can hit send – what is unique about this App is that it includes your current location when it sends the email.

If you don’t check in with your Supervisor or Call Center when required by your company’s policy, your Supervisor or Call Center has the option of calling to make sure you are Ok and if they don’t get a response, they can dispatch someone or emergency services to your location.”¹

Thumbs Up

• cost is only $.99
• good instructions

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Thumbs Down

• can not be used off-line, anyone with a WiFi mobile device (like our iPads) would not be able to consistently use this app
• you must manually enter the email address you want your email “update notice” sent to, other similar apps auto-populate email addresses from your Hotmail contacts list
• the main thing that differentiates this app from regular old email is that emails sent out using this app automatically include your address in the email.  In our tests, the app did not always record our locations accurately.  In one case it showed that we were at the building next door.  In another case it showed that we were 40 blocks from where we really were.  We would not trust our lives to this app getting our location correct.

Overall Rating

• iPad with WiFi – ♥♥

¹ Descriptions courtesy of Apple Inc.

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