U-M students create hot public safety app

Five University of Michigan students have created a new personal-safety smartphone app that lets nervous moms and dads or anyone track the progress of someone walking home at night across campus -- or to and from anywhere else.

Designed as a sort of virtual walking escort service, the Companion app is exploding in popularity. It allows a friend or family member to follow the progress of an individual on a Google map as he or she moves from Point A to Point B, but only if the walker activates the service.

If the walker encounters something nerve-racking, he or she can press the app's "I feel nervous" button. This logs the location of the perceived threat and prompts a phone call between the walker and the person who is monitoring them on their own smartphone.

The app's founders believe that university police departments across the country and even internationally could potentially use this nervous-button data to shift patrols to areas where students report feeling unsafe or install more street lights.

"It's kind of scary when you're walking home alone," said co-founder Jake Wayne, 21, a U-M senior from Franklin.

For serious trouble, the walker can press the app's "Call Police" button that will automatically dial 911 or their campus's police officers, if their university has partnered with Companion. Another app feature will emit a loud alarm if the walker gets pushed over, starts running, has their headphones yanked out or doesn't make it home in time.

The app's creators say they devised Companion to improve the actual and perceived safety on and around U-M's Ann Arbor campus. They recently expanded their push to other universities and are encouraging downloads from the general public, as the app can work in any setting where one person wishes to have another monitor his or her travels.

"Especially being a college female, for us, it was so scary," said co-founder Katie Reiner, 21, also a senior. "We'd always call our parents or call our friends when we were walking home alone. And I just always thought that was so inefficient."

Expanding to other universities

Companion app received a major boost in February when the founders won the top award in U-M's Michigan Business Challenge competition for student-led startups, receiving a $25,000 check to help scale up the company. In June, they moved out of a co-founder's house and into the Desai Accelerator on East Liberty Street.

The founders said they are in talks with 15 universities about potential partnerships in the future. Right now, they are focused on increasing the number of Companion users before attempting to monetize the app.

"We're going to bring it out nationally and globally," said co-founder Nathan Pilcowitz, 22, of Bloomfield Hills, who graduated in May. "Every campus in the world can use it."

The founders said the Companion app is proving popular with parents, who like the ability to monitor a child's whereabouts and safety, and is also embraced by their children -- from college-age on down -- who see the technology as cool.

"We're the first safety app that was made by students for students," said U-M junior Lexi Ernst, 21, another co-founder.

The app is free to download and use and gained more than 500,000 new users in just the last week following a flurry of attention on social media and from news sites, including the International Business Times. Users skew about 75% women, although some men are also fans.

"My little brother is a freshman here, and he told me a story last night where he and five friends were at like two parties and they were all walking home but they live in separate dorms," said co-founder Danny Freed, 22, who graduated from U-M in May. "So they all companioned each other and walked to their dorms, and they also companioned their moms at the same time."

The co-founders hope to eventually generate revenue by partnering with university police departments and security services, who might benefit from the app's data on popular walking paths and areas where people feel nervous.

"We're not trying to just build a data collection app where in the background we're pulling all this data and selling it off," Freed said. "We seriously want to solve this problem, and we want to solve it through data and we want to have these collaborative partnerships with public safety departments."

More data context needed

But before Companion starts snagging payments from universities, its creators may need to add context to the data the app collects so that it is more useful for public-safety officers.

Diane Brown, public information officer for U-M's Department of Public Safety and Security, said it would be nice to know the reasons why walkers press the "I feel nervous" button.

"Are you nervous because it's dark? What is it that's creating your nervousness?," Brown said.

She also noted how the "call police" function requires two button presses: a red emergency button followed by an are-you-sure button. "So I'm not sure how that is much faster than literally dialing 911," she said.

Along with U.S. college campuses, the app has been a popular download in urban areas and even cities in other countries.

In an interview last week at their downtown Ann Arbor office, the five co-founders dismissed a suggestion that their app might lead to more long-distance "helicopter parenting" by parents overly nervous about their college student. They pointed out how the app is initiated by the individual doing the walking, and only tracks that person during the walk.

"They're not always watching you. It's only when the walker — or the kid — wants you to be watching them," Wayne said.

Safety is game of perception

The founders said Companion is as much about improving the perception of safety as fending off robbery or assault attempts. They said the app's "call police" button has been pressed a couple dozen times this year, but so far, there are no confirmed instances of the app being activated during an actual safety incident.

"Safety is all a game of perception," Pilcowitz, a co-founder, said. "Something might go wrong one in every 10,000 times, but you want that peace of mind every time."

An early version of the app was rolled out on the U-M campus last fall, when Companion was more or less headquartered in Pilcowitz's bedroom in a leased off-campus house. The five founders had been friends and taking computer classes together at the university.

Like all U-M students, they received Crime Alert emails from U-M's public safety department about on and off-campus incidents such as assaults and robberies. The university has issued six such alerts since January.

"Seeing the crime alerts on campus, you can really see that things are actually happening," Reiner said. "It's not just this fear -- things are actually really going on on campus."

The most common crime involves larcenies, said Brown, the public information officer for U-M security. There are occasionally assaults, such as a Sept. 4 incident in which two male U-M students were assaulted by a group of 12 while walking off campus along East University Avenue. That incident prompted a Crime Alert.

"Right now on campus, as we understand it, students feel quite safe," Brown said. "Do we have much student-on-student crime? No we don't. Do we have the unfortunate circumstance of people coming from out of town intentionally to take advantage of our students? Yes."

Past U-M Crime Alerts:

Sept. 4: Aggravated off-campus assault of two male students accosted and beaten by a group of 12.

Aug 3: A person accosted in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library by an unknown male. The suspect yelled, threw a stapler, punched and kicked the victim before fleeing.

May 6: A male flasher exposed himself to a U-M employee along East Catherine Street.

March 29: A male was grabbed by another male in the sauna at a campus recreation building.

Feb. 17: An unknown male pulls a gun and demands money from a student walking from a parking lot on North Campus.

Jan. 21: During a dispute between two delivery truck drivers, one driver points a handgun at the other driver before driving away.

Source: University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security.