Around 1.8 million people perform Hajj each year, over five days, in the same few square kilometres, in the Saudi summer. A large share of them are elderly, abroad for the first time, and unable to read the local language.
Every safety plan built for that population currently assumes a phone: that the person in trouble can reach one, unlock it, find the right function and read what it says back. Those assumptions are reasonable in ordinary life. They fail simultaneously during Hajj, and they fail hardest for the pilgrims least able to compensate.
So we moved the safety function off the phone and onto the wrist, and moved all the complexity to the people who are calm and indoors. The band has one button. The group leader has a console that does the triage. The family has an app at home. That division of labour is the entire product.
We are early. The hardware is a prototype, the first season is a small operator pilot rather than a launch, and there are open problems we have not solved. We have written about those too, because a company selling safety equipment should be legible about what it does not yet know.
Four commitments, stated before there is pressure to break them.
Say what is true about the hardware
The band is a prototype. Every specification on this site is a design target and is labelled as one. We would rather lose a sale to a competitor with shipped hardware than win it by implying we have some.
Put the complexity on the calm people
The wearer gets one button and four vibrations. The group leader gets a console, indoors, with training. The family gets an app at home. Almost no cognitive load sits on the person in difficulty, because that is the person who has none to spare.
A safety claim has to be conservative
We raise an alert to people who are already responsible for the pilgrim. We do not dispatch anybody, we are not connected to Saudi emergency services, and we are not a medical device. Overstating any of that would encourage reliance the product cannot support.
Location data is not ours to trade
We do not sell it, aggregate it for resale, or share it beyond the group leader and the next-of-kin a pilgrim personally nominated. This is the commitment most likely to be tested commercially, which is exactly why it is written down in public.
Small, and not yet public.
Safe Daira is a small team working on hardware, firmware and the operator console. We are not publishing individual profiles yet, partly because the team is still forming, and partly because a stock-photo leadership page would be exactly the kind of thing this site is trying not to be.
If you are an operator evaluating us, you should absolutely want to know who you would be dealing with. Write to us and you will get a named person, a call, and straight answers about stage and funding.
Talk to a personSafe Daira is not our first build.
Our sibling product is Kavach, a safety band built for the Kumbh Mela and for elder care in India. Same conviction, different pilgrimage: a person in a vast crowd should be findable by the people responsible for them. Much of what the Kavach work taught us about crowds, heat and wearers who do not carry phones is in this product's bones.
The same team also runs DPF Masters, a diesel particulate filter cleaning service, and Mughlai Magic, a restaurant. Different trades entirely, listed here for one reason: you should be able to see who you are dealing with.
All of them sit under one parent, ARCG Holdings, the Hyderabad group that builds and operates them.