Posted By Rosalind Davis Our organisation employees community wardens who patrol areas of our district dealing directly with community related matters. They are currently experiencing issues with mobile phone blackspots which potentially affects their means of summonsing assistance and causes difficulty for the public to contact them. Currently they are using a PDA as this combines phone and computer. If anyone has any ideas or solutions to this problem I would appreciate your comments.

Posted By Ken John I had a similar problem with Lone Working and sourced a product from Orbis Monitoring http://www.omsl.net/ Our Lone worker worked in a very rural part of North Yorkshire and there was always a problem with mobile signal. We found that using the device we had no problem with mobile signal. Because the lone working device from Orbis worked on GPS (so it could lock onto your signal) we could always find our guy in an emergency using coordinates. It relied on condition checks and simple 24/7 monitoring from a call centre(or a shift if you prefer). So for example the monitoring company would send a message to the device and ask for a response (which is just a push of a button). If there was no response they would try again and if unsuccessful they would contact a number of pre-determined people from their list supplied by you. In addition, it also had a panic button which can be pressed by the operator and then the call centre follow a procedure of calling the emergency services etc and send them your coordinates. Also if one of you community officer were attacked or something (god forbid), immediately pressing the panic button would begin recording the event and burning to DVD at the call centre end which can be used for any following prosecution. Sorry to drag on but my experience of the device and service were very good indeed. Ken

Posted By Adam Leaver For specific areas (e.g. a hospital campus or housing estate) you may want to consider paging as a solution, you can find out more about our lone worker solutions at www.ascom.co.uk Thanks Adam Leaver

Posted By Briony Bruce Hi Rosalind, Just to enquire if you have managed to implement a lone worker monitoring solution or are you still looking? I may be able to assist you with information on services and devices. Kind Regards, Briony

Posted By Andy Petrie You could try airwave radio, a web search should give you details