If you have ever lost your mobile phone, or even if it has run out of power while you are out, you’ll know the hard way just how essential this gadget has become to modern life – and how isolated you can feel at not being able to contact your friends or family. 

Now a Chester-based start–up has solved this problem, with a new App that allows you to stay in touch with your emergency contacts and even send your precise location to friends so they can come and find you. 

My Home Call launched at the start of September with a simple solution to the problem:  what happens when you can’t access your phone and it has all your contact numbers on it. 

Using cutting-edge biometric technology and security, My Home Call allows users to access personalised, pre-programmed emergency contacts using anyone else’s mobile device, to let friends know you are out of contact, and even to come and find you. 

My Home Call’s founder, Mike Dodd, explains the App is an essential insurance policy for every mobile user:

“Everyone knows how important our mobile is to our lives today. But nowadays few people remember the actual phone numbers of friends and family, which are stored in the phones by name.” 

“If the worst happens and the phone is lost or stolen, or even just runs out of power, you are cut off from the very people you will need to tell – because all their information is on the phone you’ve just lost. Even phone tracking apps and ‘in case of emergency’ contacts are useless, because they are tied to the lost phone.”

“My Home Call is the first application to get round that problem by storing selected emergency contacts securely in the cloud. Our users simply need to borrow another phone, log in to our website using their face or fingerprint scans via the borrowed phone’s camera, and call or send a text to contact their friends or family and tell them where they are. No details are secured on the borrowed phone and privacy is tight.”

My Home Call has also integrated with what3words, a market-leading location system that has divided the entire surface of the planet into 3-meter squares. Each square is identified not by strings of coordinates but by three easy-to-remember words, making it simple to track a user’s location.

Mike explained, “We all hope we will never lose access to our mobile, but My Home Call is the perfect insurance policy for that scenario. We expect parents with teenage children with their first mobile, or students going off to university, will be early enthusiasts. But all mobile users will benefit from the app and the peace of mind it brings to the user.”

Mike and his Chester-based team are promoting the App in Chester and the North West initially but it is available now across the UK with plans to take the app international in the next year, with high hopes for success.

Mike added, “The concept is a simple one, there is no other app like it and people quickly see how useful it can be, for them or for their friends and members of their family.”

“We have plans to bring out further enhancements to store documents securely – aimed at travellers worried about losing access to flight, concert or festival tickets and the like; and also to store basic medical information to assist emergency workers and medical staff if the user should be involved in an accident or medical incident.”

My Home Call is available to download now on the Google and Apple App Stores, with an annual subscription currently only £5.95.