Admin: Set Up Child & Senior Safety Alerts

Admin: set up safety alerts

Safety alerts cover two different things under one name: child exit alerts (a guard logs a child leaving and returning; the guardian is notified) and senior wellness check-ins (a resident living alone confirms they are fine; a missed check-in escalates).

Set them up separately. They behave differently and have different consent requirements.

Before you start: settle consent

Do this before you enrol anyone. This feature goes wrong in a specific, predictable way — it becomes surveillance of adults who did not ask for it.

Get the committee to adopt, in writing:

• Enrolment is opt-in, per resident, by the flat. The committee cannot add someone because it thinks it knows best.
• Seniors of sound mind enrol themselves. A wellness check-in an adult did not consent to is not a safety feature.
• Only the registered guardian or family contact receives alerts — never a committee-wide or society-wide broadcast.
• Residents can leave the list at any time, immediately, without justifying it.
• Movement logs are retained for a short window and then purged.

If the committee is not comfortable writing these down, the society is not ready for the feature.

Step 1: Open Safety

Go to /admin/safety. This is where safety profiles are created and reviewed.

Step 2: Enrol a child

1. Create a profile of type child against the flat.
2. Add the child's name and, if your guards need it to recognise them, a photo.
3. Register the guardians who will receive notifications — usually both parents, sometimes a grandparent who is home during the day.

Keep the list to children the guards can actually recognise. A list of forty names that nobody at the gate can match to a face does not work.

Step 3: Enrol a senior resident

1. Create a profile of type senior, with the resident's agreement.
2. Register the escalation contact — usually a family member.
3. Agree the check-in cadence with the resident. Daily is standard; anything more frequent gets ignored, and ignored check-ins produce false alarms that destroy trust in the whole system.
4. Set the check-in window generously. Someone who taps at 9am one day and 2pm the next is fine. Only a full missed window should escalate.

Step 4: Define the escalation ladder

Write it down and brief the people in it:

1. Reminder to the resident
2. Notification to the family contact
3. Committee member or guard does a physical door knock

Put a real time gap between each step, and name who does the door knock, by shift. An escalation ladder whose last rung is "someone should check" has no last rung.

Step 5: Brief the gate

Child exit alerts depend entirely on a guard logging the movement at the moment it happens. If logging lags by ten minutes it is worse than useless, because the parent gets a false sense of timing.

Cover with each shift:

• Which children are enrolled and how to recognise them
• To log both the exit and the return
• That every gate must log — a child can leave by one gate and return by another, and a missing return event leaves a parent with an unresolved exit

Step 6: Audit it in the first month

Compare a few known cases against the log. Did the exit get recorded? Within how long? Did the return get recorded at all?

This is the step societies skip, and it is the one that tells you whether the feature is real.

Deactivating a profile

Deactivate from the flat's profile. Do this immediately on request, and as part of your move-out process — a profile left active after a family leaves is a data-retention problem.

Audit

Profiles are scoped to your society, alerts reach only the registered contacts, and every state change writes to the append-only audit log so the committee can review how the feature has actually been used.

Frequently asked questions

Can we enrol a senior resident who has not agreed? No. Enrolment requires the resident's agreement. Overriding it creates a data-protection problem for the society.

Does this track children by GPS? No. It records gate events logged by a guard — an exit and a return. There is no continuous location tracking, which is deliberate.

Who sees a child's movement history? The registered guardian and the resident. It is not a committee-wide report and should not be retained indefinitely.

What happens when a senior travels for three weeks? Pause their check-ins, or every holiday triggers a false emergency. Agree this with the resident when you enrol them.

A guard forgot to log an exit. What then? The alert does not fire. The feature is exactly as reliable as your gate discipline, which is why the rollout starts with staff briefing rather than a resident announcement.

Related: Resident: use safety alerts · Child and senior safety alerts explained · Admin: set up Emergency SOS