An athlete in your event can raise an Alert if they need help. It reaches you, the organisers, so your dashboard is where you see and manage it.
What an Alert is, and is not
Be clear on this before your event, and brief your athletes on it too (see What to tell your riders before the event).
- An Alert is an in-app notification and location share. It tells the organisers that an athlete needs help and shows their last known position. It's a call for attention, not a guaranteed emergency response.
- Aster does not contact the emergency services. It cannot call for an athlete. The athlete's own screen offers a one-tap Call emergency services button (it dials 112, which reaches the emergency services across the UK and the EU), but placing that call is down to the athlete or to you. The app never does it.
- An Alert does not guarantee anyone will respond. It's an aid, not a rescue service. Your event still needs a real emergency plan.
Deciding whether and when to escalate to the emergency services is your call, not the app's.
Good to know: the alert doesn't fire instantly
When an athlete raises an Alert, they get a 60-second countdown with a large Cancel button, so an accidental tap doesn't send a false alert to your dashboard. If they don't cancel, the Alert sends and you're notified. They can also mark it a false alarm themselves from their own screen after sending, which closes it the same way your False alarm button does.
What you see
Active Alerts appear on your race-day dashboard, highlighted so they're impossible to miss, and refreshed every few seconds. Each one shows:
- The athlete who raised it.
- Their last known location, so you can find them.
- When it was raised and its current status.
If the athlete has chosen to share their phone number for emergencies, it appears on the alert too. Otherwise it stays hidden.
Resolved and past alerts move to a separate Alert history view, so the live dashboard only shows what's still open.
Responding
You move an alert through these states:
- Responding: you've seen it and you're dealing with it. This records that you're on it and who acknowledged it.
- Resolved: the situation is handled. This closes the alert.
- False alarm: not a real emergency (an accidental trigger, say). This also closes the alert.
If nobody marks an alert Responding within a couple of minutes, Aster notifies the organisers again, so an open alert can't quietly sit unseen.
You can message the athlete directly from the alert. They receive your message as a notification and can reply, giving you a two-way thread while you coordinate help.
Important: an Alert never ends the ride
Raising an Alert is completely separate from finishing. The athlete keeps being tracked, which is exactly what you want when someone may need help, so their live location stays visible and keeps updating. To end an athlete's ride you set their status yourself (see Running the event on race day). An Alert on its own changes nothing about their race record.
Good to know: automatic crash detection covers your event too
Aster can automatically start an alert countdown if it detects a hard, sudden stop, whether the athlete is on a Just Ride or tracking your event, whatever the format: race, time trial, sportive, meet-up or point-to-point. The countdown and the alert it raises are identical either way, so everything above (the 60-second cancellable countdown, what appears on your dashboard, how you respond) applies the same to a crash-triggered alert as to one an athlete raises by hand. There is no separate badge or flag to tell the two apart on your side.