New App set to help women feel safer when out

OVERWHELMINGLY, women don’t feel safe when they’re out for a run, especially after dark.

In a 2023 survey conducted by Adidas, 92% of women said they’re concerned for their safety while running. This level of concern is not unwarranted. The 2022 murder of Ashling Murphy in Tullamore, Co Offaly while she was out for a run in the middle of the day reverberated throughout Ireland, and heightened the vulnerability most women feel.

A cursory Google search using the terms “running” “women”, and “after dark” throws up all kinds of advice for women on how they can be safe while exercising in the evenings.

The advice ranges from running with others, being alert, and staying within populated areas, to wearing reflective gear, and making sure you have your phone with you. The phone can act like a lifeline, giving women the feeling that they’re connected to someone if they feel unsafe.

The power of the phone to offer connection and reassurance is what the team at SAOR Health has tapped into. They are developing an app that will allow women to build a community around their exercising, with features aimed at making them feel more confident about being out and about after dark.

SAOR Health evolved out of an MBA project in University College Dublin, when Éamonn Fennell, Luke Hart and Noel Quinn realised just how many women felt unsafe when running after dark.

They conducted a survey of 500 women which found nine out of 10 felt unsafe exercising alone in dark evenings. Together with Lewine O’Connell, they formed SAOR Health and began investigating the development of an app to help tackle the issue.

“We know there is a significant drop off of women exercising during the winter months, and this can have a knock-on effect on their physical and mental health,” explains Lewine O’Connell, co-founder of SAOR Health. 

We wanted to create a solution that would give women confidence to exercise outdoors without risking their safety.

The app has three core features: SOS Tribe, Training Tribe, and Route Rating.

The SOS Tribe is a woman’s emergency contacts. If she feels unsafe on a run, she can double tap on the app’s screen to send an immediate SOS notification to her emergency contacts. The notification will include the woman’s real-time GPS location.

“As well as sending the SOS notification to emergency contacts, the app flags the alert in the user’s Training Tribe, ensuring other women she has formed a tribe with will see the alert,” adds Lewine.

The Training Tribe is made up of a woman’s trusted group.

“Within this feature, women can share their real-time location with their core group. It also makes it easy for women to form a community and support each other.

“With exercise routines the ‘we can help shape the me’; women supporting each other can make it easier to stick with a programme,” says Lewine.

The Route Rating function is led by users, allowing women to rate various routes on how safe they felt on them.

Users can rate the route based on things like how well lit it is, how populated it is, what the terrain is like, and how safe they felt. 

"They give it a rating out of five. This information is fed into the app, making it easy for women to identify safe routes based on real data from real people,” explains Lewine.

“This user-led information fosters a supportive community as women share their feedback on routes and contribute to each other’s safety.”

As well as active runners, the app can also be used by women who may have stopped exercising for one reason or another, or lots of different reasons.

Lewine hopes it may give these women a kickstart to get back to exercising, by reducing the anxiety they may feel about exercising in the evenings, and helping them to build their own supportive community.

SAOR Health is being supported by Cork-based Health Innovation Hub Ireland (HIHI).

“The team at HIHI are helping us on our development journey. They are experts in this space and they are helping us to run clinical studies on the app. They are also providing us with access to a huge network,” says Lewine.

The app is currently in development and will be available in Ireland in line with the Paris Olympics 2024.

“We’re also working with a project team to determine how to launch into the UK market, and we expect to do that in year two. By year three, we hope to make the app available to US users,” says Lewine.

The app will be available for free initially on Google Play store and iTunes