Safety Check-in

A safety check-in is a brief remote-communication exchange — most often a phone call, text, or app-based 'ping' — whose primary purpose is to confirm the safety and wellbeing of a person at a distance, rather than to exchange substantive information. The pattern is common in family-based care of people with cognitive disabilities, elders ageing in place, lone workers, travellers in remote areas, and other at-risk populations, and it generates specific design requirements for communication tools: one-touch initiation, minimal response burden (a single button press can stand in for a voice reply), escalation to a secondary contact when missed, and optional location sharing. The term was explicitly defined in Melissa Dawe's 2007 study of mobile phone use by young adults with cognitive disabilities and their parent caregivers.