Little Green Button: turning your PC into a panic button

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2004. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

What do you do if you need help quickly? Perhaps a patient is being aggressive or threatening, or maybe someone has fainted or is having a fit and you need to summon help. There are times when picking up the phone and dialling a number either isn’t possible, because of an attacker, or just takes too long. Certainly in my surgery whenever I try to ring reception it is engaged or unanswered. What is needed is some form of panic button that is both discreet to use, for those situations where you don’t want to alarm the patient, and effective in summoning help quickly.

Up till now most panic buttons have been hard wired into the building. This involves installing lots of switches and cabling and usually either boxes on the wall to tell people where the alarm has been called or lights that flash outside rooms.

However, we all have a computer on our desks and these are already networked up together. If you are anything like me it is on from the moment I arrive to the moment I leave. A company called Wiggly-Amps have produced a product that turns your computer into a panic button. It was originally part of their bigger piece of software called EnCompass. However, user feedback was so positive they decided they would extract the software from the bigger suite and market it on its own.

Essentially the Little Green Button is a program that loads at start-up of your computer, so it is present from the moment you switch on. Installation is very easy and takes a few minutes. Nothing has to be installed on your server and no special network software is needed. As long as you are using some form of network the software should work fine.

I had a minor problem installing it on a couple of machines. I rang the helpdesk at 5.30pm on a Friday afternoon and was impressed to get straight through to someone who was very helpful, knew what the problem was and talked me through fixing it in a matter of minutes. The problem was already known about and indeed a newer version was available on their website that had fixed the bug, but I was using an older version and hadn’t checked.

There are several settings that you need to think about when installing the software. Groups of machines can be set up as being in a particular zone. This was implemented initially for branch surgeries, but in a large building one floor can trigger alarms in one reception area whilst rooms on another floor can trigger alarms in a different area. You also have to think about whether you want to set each machine to act as a panic button or as a receiver of messages, or both. In consulting rooms it might be worth setting as both as, if someone in the room next door needs help, you might be quicker to respond than somebody at reception who might be down a long corridor. Each workstation can be named and it is this name that flashes up on the screen when activated, so it is worth thinking about how your rooms are named.

When the software is installed what you see is a small green circle in the top corner of the screen, which can be set to several different sizes. This button floats on top of everything else and is always present. Initially I thought it would be very distracting but I quickly forgot about it.

To activate the button all that you need to do is double-click on the green circle. This is very easy to do and can be done very subtly without the patient in the room knowing. The only sign that it has been clicked is that it turns from green to red. Double-clicking on it again will reset it back to green. When it is clicked, any machine that is set up to be a receiver of messages has a big warning message flashed up on its screen and a siren noise played over its speakers.

You can now also get a real button, presumably for those with lower levels of mouse skills. This is a fairly cheaply made device that plugs into one of the serial ports on your computer and can be screwed under a desk or onto a wall; however, I think it is a waste of money.

You can download a 14-day trial off the Wiggly-Amps website and I would recommend this just to hear the laughs when people first hear the siren that goes with alarm activation. Pricing seems very reasonable, especially when you consider the labour costs of installing a fixed system. Overall I was very impressed with the software and perhaps the best endorsement is that when my wife saw it she felt it was exactly what her surgery needed. I am hoping they bring out another button that I can use to request coffee with.