At the end of June 2026, a heat dome sat over Europe for days and refused to move — more than 45 °C in Spain, the hottest day on record in France, over 41 °C in eastern Germany. According to an early scientific estimate, the week of June 22–28 alone caused around 20,000 heat-related deaths across Europe* — most of them not in public, but at home, alone. And the next heatwave is already on the horizon.
Heat is usually talked about as something to just get through: drink plenty of water, close the blinds, avoid the midday sun. That’s true and it matters — but it misses the most dangerous part: heatstroke takes away exactly the ability you’d need to save yourself.
Why heat is a different kind of risk when you live alone
Heatstroke is a medical emergency: body temperature climbs above 40 °C, and the warning signs are confusion, dizziness, nausea, slurred speech, and eventually loss of consciousness. In other words, exactly the symptoms that stop you from thinking clearly, reaching for the phone, and calling for help.
If you live with someone, you have a built-in alarm — sooner or later, someone notices that something is wrong. If you live alone, that alarm is missing. It can take hours before anyone notices anything at all, and with heatstroke, every minute counts. Especially at risk are older adults (a weaker sense of thirst, worse temperature regulation), people with chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease — and many common medications also interfere with temperature regulation), and people living alone at any age.
What the usual advice doesn’t solve
Standard advice only helps as long as you’re conscious and able to act. An SOS button only helps if you can press it. For the real worst case — unconscious, phone two meters away — what’s missing isn’t another button, but a system that raises the alarm on its own when you stop checking in. These solutions go by names like check-in app, inactivity detector, or passive emergency app — at their core, they’re the same thing: the only category that still works when you yourself can no longer do anything. Unlike a traditional home emergency button, Alma needs no extra hardware to do this.
How a passive safety net works during a heatwave
The principle is simple: at set times, you confirm with a single tap that everything’s fine. If that confirmation doesn’t come, the app automatically notifies your saved emergency contacts. The absence of a check-in is the call for help. If you schedule your check-in for late afternoon — when the heat inside your home peaks — family or neighbors find out within minutes if you’ve collapsed, instead of only the next day.
What matters: cloud-based monitoring (the alarm still works with a dead or powered-off phone), multiple notification channels, a time window with a buffer to prevent false alarms, and sharing your last known location if a check-in is missed.
Where Alma comes in
Alma was built for exactly this moment. At its core is Safety Net: a personalized check-in schedule with up to three windows a day and up to five emergency contacts. If you don’t check in, Alma automatically notifies your saved contacts, optionally shares your last known location, and escalates the alert through a chain of contacts if the first one doesn’t respond. Because monitoring runs in the cloud, the alarm still works even with the phone switched off. Alma shows no ads, sells no data, is GDPR-compliant, and keeps its servers in Germany. Safety Net comes with a free 14-day trial.
If instead you want to keep an eye on a parent, neighbor, or friend who lives alone, you can sign up as their emergency contact — free, with a live dashboard and an automatic alert as soon as a check-in is missed.
Look out for your neighbors — before it hits 40 degrees
The most effective heat preparation is often the simplest: know who in your neighborhood lives alone, and keep an eye on them. The older woman a floor up, the neighbor with heart trouble, the friend who’s currently living alone — a quick knock on a hot day costs nothing and can mean everything.
The best time to do this is now, before the next heatwave arrives — not in the middle of it, when everything becomes frantic. Set up the app together, calmly, over a cup of coffee: the person living alone sets their own check-in window, and you take on the role of emergency contact on the other end. Ten minutes of effort, once — and by the next 40-degree day, the safety net is already in place. Set up together, it doesn’t feel like surveillance either — it feels like what it actually is: an agreement between people who look out for each other.
In an emergency
Heatstroke is life-threatening. If you notice confusion, altered consciousness, or seizures, call emergency services immediately, move the person into the shade, cool them down, and raise their legs. Alma does not replace emergency services or medical care and is not a medical device — it provides the one thing technology can offer here: making sure someone finds out in time that help is needed, even when you can no longer call for it yourself.
The next heatwave can’t be switched off. But you can make sure you’re not left unnoticed for hours on a 40-degree day — set up in just a few minutes.
Do you live alone, or are you worried about a neighbor who does? Set it up together before the next heatwave hits: download Alma for iOS or Android and start Safety Net’s free 14-day trial.
* First scientific estimate by Christopher Callahan (Indiana University Bloomington) for the period June 22–28, 2026, published as a preprint (not yet peer-reviewed). Official national figures won’t be available for weeks to months.