The University of Birmingham has shown that its dedicated to keeping its students and staff safe by launching Callmy, its new security app designed to notify students when an emergency situation is happening in the campus.
According to the university, the app will stay dormant once installed but it automatically sends an alarm, text, and a voice or picture message when a situation deemed as an emergency occurs in the campus.
The development of the app was inspired by a cross-campus power outage in 2012 where students used Twitter as a means of passing information to other students. However, school security officials say that social media has its disadvantages in a way that students had to seek the information themselves. Callmy, on the other hand, automatically sends the information to the person.
The University of Birmingham officials are encouraging its students to download the app citing that in the past, the university has faced certain emergency situations and the university had difficulty disseminating information among students. With the app, they hope to have emergency information delivered timely and less intrusively to students and staff wherever they are at the campus.
Once downloaded, students then follow 'UBSafe,' and they will get instant notifications from the University of Birmingham. University officials said that only vital and relevant notification will be sent to condition students how important these alerts are. Moreover, the university will also send out an alert every month just to make sure the app will always stay in the students' consciousness.
The app is available on Apple iOS, android, and Windows phone. It will not also take a lot of space since it only takes 2.35MB to have it on your phone. The app is also user-friendly for those who have visual or even auditory impairment since it has two types of messaging - voice and picture messages.
