“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” no matter what decade you grew up in you undoubtedly remember the commercial, and if not, you may have seen the episode of the Goldbergs featuring the same First Alert device. First Alert features a pendant designed to be worn around the neck of an elderly person, which wirelessly connects to a box and a phone line. Pushing the button signals the box, which calls a call center, which calls the person in distress back (through the box speaker no less) and then assesses what’s wrong. While cutting edge when released in the 80’s this technology is long outdated and practically unsafe.

We live in a world where things need to happen now and simultaneously. With the fast paced nature of today’s society also comes the fact that bad things come at the exact same rapid pace. Evil doers, rapists, thugs and attackers know that they have a very very limited amount of time to victimize somebody. And, of course chest pains and other physical ailments come just as quickly.

Luckily there’s bcon, a new smartphone app and companion device that operates at a moments notice. The app is set up to summon your list of important contacts, with pre-written informational messages and your exact GPS coordinates. The companion bcon button is used as a trigger device or panic button, much the same way that the First Alert was designed. But rather than routing the distress signal through a piece of hardware, a slow phone line and a call center, the bcon device activates the app from as far as 50 feet away and then those that can help you for whatever reason, are immediately notified.

“We are trying to create a culture of being able to instantly launch a message without the need to use standard modes that are slow and don’t allow a user to be discrete. Bcon drastically cuts the time it takes to send data to an arrangement of contacts including important details that can be detrimental in case of an emergency.” The bcon team said in their OneSpark profile. 

There are a lot of companies combining hardware with apps at this year’s OneSpark festival in Jacksonville Florida. You can check out bcon in person and see all of it’s many uses at the CSI Tech Village. You can find out more about them online here and here.