In the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard, Police are urging people to download personal safety app, HOLLIE Guard.

The app was created following the murder of Hollie Gazzard in Gloucester, who was brutally stabbed 14 times in front of terrified staff and customers while working in a hair salon by her ex-partner.

Safety concerns have skyrocketed in recent days and downloads of the HOLLIE Guard app have topped 200,000 after yet another woman’s life was taken by the hands of a man.

How Does the Personal Safety App Work?

Simply shake or tap to activate the app and it will then go on to notify trusted contacts with the user’s location, audio and video evidence.

It has two modes, deterrent and stealth:

In deterrent mode, HOLLIE Guard makes it clear to people around that an alarm has been triggered. Anyone who looks at the phone will see that the GPS location is being monitored and audio/video evidence is being uploaded. The phone will display the message ‘Alert Raised’.

When in stealth mode, the app activates a silent alert and operates as discreetly as possible. A wallpaper will appear to look as though it’s the user’s home screen.

HOLLIE Guard also includes a journey feature, meetings feature, reports feature and man down feature.

The Journey feature allows the user to set start and end locations with emergency contacts being notified either on safe arrival or non-arrival within given time parameters. The phone will be tracked via GPS.

The Meetings feature allows the user to set a designated duration time for an event, notifiying emergency contacts if the user has not marked themselves safe within the allotted time period.

To make recording an incident and gathering supporting evidence easy, HOLLIE Guard’s Reports feature automatically time-stamps, geo-tags and saves information to the HOLLIE Guard server.

Lastly, if the user has a sudden fall or stops moving for a length of time, the app will automatically trigger its man down feature.

The Personal Safety App was Created Following the Horrific Murder of Hollie Gazzard

The app was created after a chance meeting between the Gazzard family and PanicGuard founder Mikkel Dissing.

Mr Dissing said: “PanicGuard and the Hollie Guard app were founded with the purpose of helping people feel safe and to provide a solution when people find themselves in a dangerous situation.

“We want to raise awareness of Hollie Guard so that we can protect as many communities as possible.”

The HOLLIE Guard service has been expanded to provide the (paid for) option of real-time assistance via a police-approved, 24/7 alert monitoring centre.

The Hollie Guard app is free to download on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store.

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