Becon

Personal safety without losing privacy

Becon is a personal safety app that looks out for you on solo journeys. CodeLeap designed and built the whole product — the apps, the backend and the live-alert platform — monitoring each trip in the background and raising the alarm automatically if you go quiet.

What we did CodeLeap built the behavioural safety algorithm that uses machine learning to spot abrupt stops and erratic motion, so the app recognises trouble from how someone is moving rather than waiting for a button press, and always asks the user to confirm they are safe before escalating to their contacts.

Safety, one tap away.

Becon is a personal safety app that looks after people on their everyday journeys on foot, monitoring a walk in the background, recognising when something has gone wrong and alerting trusted contacts if the user cannot confirm they are safe. CodeLeap built the app for iOS and Android in four months and launched it on both stores, where it has since reached thousands of downloads and holds a 4.8-star rating on the App Store. The launch drew coverage in Forbes, Marie Claire, Sustain Health and Tech Times, and The Metro described Becon as “the must-download app for late night travel by foot”.

Product features

Battery-efficient background geolocation

The app tracks a journey continuously using low-power location services, giving real-time position data without the battery drain that makes most continuous tracking impractical. A safety app that flattens a phone before the walk is over protects nobody, so efficiency here was a functional requirement rather than an optimisation.
Behavioural safety algorithm

Machine learning and behavioural analysis are used to detect unusual walking patterns, including abrupt stops and erratic motion, identifying potential trouble from how someone is moving rather than waiting for them to press a button. This is what allows the app to respond to situations in which the user is unable to raise an alarm themselves.
Interactive journey map

An in-app map shows the user's position, their planned route and any deviation from it, and key contacts can access journey updates when they need them, making the monitoring transparent to everyone involved rather than opaque.
Automated SMS alerts

If an anomaly is detected, the app first asks the user to confirm they are safe, and if no response comes, key contacts receive an SMS containing the last known location, a timestamp and the details of the alert. The messages are designed to work in low-connectivity environments, since the moments when they matter most are rarely the moments with the best signal.
Critical alerts and notifications

High-priority notifications reach the user even when their phone is in silent or do-not-disturb mode, so a safety prompt is never missed simply because of a device setting.
Emergency information hub

A companion website explains to key contacts how the app works, how alerts are triggered and what to do when one arrives, which means the people on the receiving end of an alert understand it before they ever get one.

Challenge

Becon's founders came to CodeLeap with a clear mission, which was to make walking safer for people in cities worldwide. The app they envisaged had to track a journey on foot, recognise unexpected behaviour and escalate to emergency alerts, all of which required continuous location monitoring and behavioural analysis running on a phone in the user's pocket. The difficulty was that everything about that description sits in tension with the other requirement the founders held just as firmly, namely that the app must preserve the user's privacy and independence. A safety product that surveils its users, or that hands control of their movements to somebody else, defeats its own purpose. Delivering meaningful protection while leaving the user in control of their data and their autonomy was the problem to be solved, and it had to be solved efficiently enough to run all day on a phone battery.

Solution

CodeLeap developed and launched the Becon app for iOS and Android within four months. When a user begins a walking journey, the app monitors speed, motion and location to detect anomalies, and when it finds one it prompts the user to confirm their safety before escalating anything. Only if that confirmation does not come do key contacts receive an SMS with the last known location and the alert details, which keeps the user in control of the process at every point where control is possible. The accompanying information hub prepares key contacts for the alerts they may receive, so the response on the other end is informed rather than panicked. Since launch the app has reached thousands of downloads, holds a 4.8-star rating on the App Store and has attracted significant national press attention.