#5 "Text Me When You Get Home!!"

Now, there’s an app for that! The Companion app helps your friend get home safely. The app “virtually walks” your friend home.

Here’s how it works:

from Business Insider:

Tens of thousands of people around the world are now using a free personal-safety mobile app that allows friends to virtually walk you home at night.

The Companion app, created by five students from the University of Michigan, enables users to request a friend or family member to keep them company virtually and track their journey home via GPS on an online map.

Although they can do so, the friend or family member does not need to have installed the Companion app, which is available for both Android and iOS.

The user can send out several requests to different phone contacts in case people are not available to be a companion or not with their phones at the time.

Those contacted then receive an SMS text message with a hyperlink in it that sends them to a web page with an interactive map showing the user walking to their destination. If the user strays off their path, falls, is pushed, starts running, or has their headphones yanked out of their phone, the app detects these changes in movement and asks the user if they’re OK.

If the user is fine, they press a button on the app to confirm within 15 seconds. If they do not press the button, or a real emergency is occurring, the Companion app transforms the user’s phone into a personal alarm system that projects loud noises to scare criminals from the scene, and gives you the option to instantly call the police.

If the user calls 911, the app will also alert the person’s relevant university campus safety department within the US, but this feature is only applicable to universities that have signed up to work with Companion.

At the same time, the app will send an alert to the contact who is keeping you company, and that person can choose to call the police and give them your location, as well as call you to find out if you are OK.

People in other countries can still use the app by entering their phone number, together with country code. In an emergency, the app will call the police and send SMS text messages to chosen companions.

“We’ve had a lot of people outside the US downloading the app. Since we launched, we’ve had dozens of emails from people in the US, as well as many other countries like the UK, Belgium, France, and Norway,” Lexie Ernst, cofounder of the Companion app and a senior at the University of Michigan who is majoring in business with a minor in computer science, told IBTimes UK.

“Both men and women from all demographics have emailed us saying they’d love to use the app. Lots of parents want to use the app for their children, and some people want their elderly parents to use it, too, to make sure they don’t get lost.”