Trials begin this week to improve women’s safety in Bath for the Epowar app – a revolutionary new smartwatch app that monitors the wearer’s heart rate and body motion to sense distress, automatically sending an emergency alert.
The app is aimed primarily at women’s safety, eliminating the major issue with rape alarms and other conventional safety products: they need to be physically activated, which is often not an option in the event of an attack.
The innovative smartwatch app solves this problem, using AI to instantly recognise distress in a user’s activity – responding immediately if a user is attacked when walking or running alone.
Reclaiming public space & women's safety through tech
Inspiration for the app came to E-J Roodt, a BSc Business student at the University’s School of Management, while jogging in a badly lit park and worrying about the risk of an attack.
E-J, a keen smartwatch user, was aware of the advancements in wearable technology and how it was being used to detect heart attacks – saving real lives. She wondered if those concepts could be applied to women’s safety and took her ideas to Maks Rahman, an engineering student who had just returned from a year at Fraunhofer IPA, a medical research organisation. Together, they co-founded Epowar.
Meet the founders of Epowar
"We were fascinated to find that people’s responses to distress were remarkably consistent and that this could be reliably captured and interpreted using AI."
— E-J Roodt, Co-founder
The AI-powered system was built on extensive research into detectable responses to physical distress and an analysis of thousands of samples of physiological and motion data. The AI models can distinguish between physical and psychological stress.
“It occurred to us that a smartwatch with this app may be a way to alert others if a woman is restrained or struggling. The key is that it would all happen automatically and an assailant would have little or no time to prevent this – which is not always possible with conventional panic buttons, rape alarms or your mobile phone,” Roodt said.
Roodt said she was keen to avoid the privacy issues that have clouded other security apps, which may include tracking the user. Epowar’s software does not track or identify the wearer, up to the point where an alert is issued. A user could choose to run the app permanently or switch it on for specific journeys where he/she felt there was potential risk. The data collected would be used to fine-tune the app but would be anonymised, she said.
