This blog post originally appeared on The Parachute Blog at parachute.live/checkup, where it can be read without popups, cookies and trackers
Introducing Checkup: Daily Safety Checks During COVID‑19
Personal safety app Parachute launches Checkup, a powerful new add-on that checks up on you every 12 hours and alerts your friends and loved ones if you don’t mark yourself safe
Our world is going through the toughest challenge it’s faced in recent history. The United States, and Parachute’s home, New York City, have been the hardest hit. Our city’s bustling streets are now eerily silent. Its roaring energy has been replaced with uncomfortable stillness. The heroes keeping us safe — doctors, nurses, janitors, delivery drivers, grocery store employees — are out on the battleground, coming face to face with danger every day, often with insufficient protective equipment. Those of us lucky enough to be quarantining in our homes are isolated from our friends and, in many cases, our families.
Today we are launching Checkup, a powerful new Parachute add-on that can provide you and your loved ones with some peace of mind during the COVID-19 pandemic. Checkup checks up on you every 12 hours and alerts your friends and loved ones if you don’t mark yourself safe. Your emergency contacts receive life-saving information, like your last known location and your emergency notes.
With Checkup turned on, every time you launch Parachute it automatically marks you safe and saves a breadcrumb with your location. Location breadcrumbs are a privacy-preserving way to keep a life-saving location trail that helps others retrace your steps, but, unlike apps designed to share your location 24x7, it only shares this location trail if you miss your checkup. Checkup keeps a rolling trail of your location breadcrumbs for the past 10 days, while deleting any older breadcrumbs.
Once 12 hours have passed since you last marked yourself safe, Checkup checks up on you with a push notification. From that point, you have 12 hours to mark yourself safe, during which you receive additional push and email prompts. If you don’t mark yourself safe by then, Parachute automatically alerts your friends and loved ones, and sends them your location trail and emergency notes.
As always, your emergency contacts are notified by text, phone and email. Any additional actions you specify in other add-ons are also performed. With the Phone Alert add-on, your emergency contacts hear your pre-recorded message over the phone when Parachute calls to alert them. And with the Twitter add-on, your pre-written tweet is tweeted, along with a link to the Parachute incident.
Checkup was originally developed to help changemakers around the world alert their colleagues and loved ones if they suddenly “go missing” and give them a way to retrace their steps and access other important information through their emergency notes. A small group of organizations around the world have been using Checkup for the past year to keep their colleagues on the front lines safe. But, during this tough time, we have realized that others can also benefit from this powerful feature, which is why we are now making it available to all Parachute members. Checkup can provide an extra layer of protection for our heroes on the front lines, for our loved ones who are sick, and for the rest of us who are isolated at home. It can relieve some of our anxiety and help us sleep a little better at night, knowing that Parachute has our back.
To all of our members and organizations around the world, thank you for trusting us with keeping you safe during this difficult time. Not a day goes by without us feeling the weight of this responsibility. To our heroes on the front lines, thank you for your contribution to humanity. We will never forget this. Just like the Empire State Building’s heartbeat every night, our cities’ hearts keep beating, fighting for the day this crisis is over. We will emerge from this stronger than ever.
Parachute is the most powerful safety app in the world, born in 2015 after winning the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon. Marinos is an engineer and the CEO of Parachute, based in New York. He can be reached at marinos@parachute.live
For more on Checkup, as well as answers to frequently asked questions about Checkup, visit Parachute Help
