Lone Worker Safety Monitoring: What the Law Actually Wants

Last updated: 8 September 2026

In short: Lone worker safety is a risk assessment duty, not a device purchase. Working alone is legal. What is not acceptable is failing to assess the risk and put arrangements in place. A LoRaWAN panic button is a genuinely useful fixed alarm inside your own site, and it is not the same thing as an accredited lone worker service with police response.

The usual lone worker sequence is backwards. Somebody has a near miss, a device gets bought, and the risk assessment is written afterwards to justify it. That produces hardware nobody wears and an assessment nobody reads.

This guide sets out what the law actually asks for, where fixed alarm hardware genuinely helps, and the specific line between a site panic button and a monitored lone worker service.

Is it legal to work alone?

Yes. There is no general prohibition, and the Health and Safety Executive is explicit that lone workers face the same hazards at work as anyone else, but there is a greater risk of those hazards causing harm because they may not have anyone to help or support them if things go wrong.

HSE’s position is that employers should provide training, supervision, monitoring and support for lone workers. Those four words are the actual specification, and none of them names a product.

The underlying duty sits in the risk assessment. Under regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health and safety of employees while they are at work, and where there are five or more employees the significant findings must be recorded.

So the first deliverable in any lone worker project is a written assessment that names the specific situations, not a purchase order.

What the risk assessment has to work through

Lone working is not one risk, it is several, and they need different controls. Working through them in this order stops you buying a device that addresses the wrong one.

• Can the work be done safely by one person at all? Some tasks cannot. Confined space entry, live electrical work and certain lifting operations need a second person present, and no alarm changes that.
• What happens if they are injured and cannot call? This is the case that panic buttons do not cover, because an unconscious person presses nothing.
• What is the violence risk? A lone worker dealing with the public faces a different threat from one alone in a plant room.
• How would anyone know something was wrong? If the honest answer is that a colleague would eventually notice they had not come back, that is the gap.
• How long would help take? A response plan that depends on someone reading an email is not a response plan.

Answer those five and the appropriate lone worker control usually becomes obvious, and it is often procedural rather than technical. A booking-out board, a defined check-in time and a named person who escalates costs nothing and closes the most common gap.

Where a fixed panic button helps the lone worker

Inside a building or a defined site, on your own network, a LoRaWAN button is a good answer to a specific problem: a lone worker in a known location who needs to raise an alarm without reaching a phone.

The Milesight WS101 is a LoRaWAN smart button supporting multiple press actions, with a red button variant intended primarily for SOS alarms, a built-in LED and buzzer for press actions and network status, NFC configuration, and range quoted up to 15 km in line of sight.

It also supports LoRa D2D, which allows one device to trigger another directly without going through the gateway. For a lone worker application that matters, because it means a button press can light a beacon or sound a sounder even if the backhaul is down.

Good fits are plant rooms, cold stores, workshops, reception desks, treatment rooms and any fixed position where the person is somewhere known and the need is to summon a colleague quickly. Mount buttons where a person can reach them from the floor, not only at head height, because someone who has fallen cannot reach a wall plate at 1.4 m.

Where it is the wrong tool, and this matters

Be clear about the limits, because a lone worker device that is trusted beyond its capability is worse than none at all.

A LoRaWAN button has no GPS, so it cannot tell you where a mobile person is. It tells you which button was pressed, which is only useful if that button is in a fixed known place. It has no man-down or fall detection, so it does nothing for an unconscious casualty. And it depends entirely on your own network coverage, so it stops at the edge of your gateway’s range.

Most importantly, it is not connected to anybody outside your organisation. Somebody on your staff has to see the alert and act, at three in the morning as well as at three in the afternoon.

That is the dividing line with a monitored service. BS 8484, currently BS 8484:2022, covers the supplier, the device or application, training and support, and Alarm Receiving Centres. An accredited ARC can hold a Unique Reference Number that enables direct police contact, bypassing 999 and giving a level 1 police response, with alarms expected to connect within 30 seconds.

If your lone worker risk is violence from the public, or staff working off site and out of hours, that is the category you need. A site button does not substitute for it, and no amount of configuration makes it equivalent.

Presence sensing, and the consent problem

There is a second lone worker approach that gets less attention: instead of the person raising an alarm, the system notices that expected movement has stopped.

A presence sensor in a plant room can escalate if someone entered and has not moved for twenty minutes. This covers the unconscious casualty case that a button cannot, and it needs no action from the worker.

It also monitors people, and that has to be handled openly. Tell staff what is collected, why, how long it is kept and who sees it. Use sensors that report presence rather than identity where possible, and write the purpose into the lone worker procedure so it reads as a safety control rather than surveillance.

Get this wrong and the system is resented and worked around. Get it right, by involving the people it protects in the design, and it is usually welcomed by staff who work alone at night.

Building the response plan first

Every lone worker alarm needs a defined destination, and this is the part most often left undone. Hardware installed without it produces alerts into a void.

Write down four things for each alarm type. Who receives it, on what device, what they are expected to do, and who receives it if the first person does not respond within a stated number of minutes.

Then test it. Press the button at 02:00 on a weekend and see what actually happens, because that is the scenario the system exists for and it is never the scenario anyone rehearses. An untested lone worker escalation path is an assumption, not a control.

Review after every activation, real or accidental. Accidental presses are useful data, because they show you where a button is badly placed and they prove the chain works.

A lone worker checklist you can actually work through

If you need somewhere to start on Monday morning, this is the order that produces a defensible position fastest, and most of it costs nothing.

List the situations, not the people. Night shift plant checks, weekend call-outs, first in and last out, home visits, contractors on site alone. Each is a distinct lone worker scenario with its own answer.

Rule out what should not be done alone. Write that list explicitly and make it a prohibition rather than a preference, because the pressure to press on is highest exactly when nobody is watching.

Fix the check-in before buying anything. A named person, a stated time, and a defined escalation if the check-in does not come. This single control closes more lone worker gaps than any device.

Then add hardware where the gap is real. Fixed buttons for known positions on your own site. An accredited monitored service where staff are mobile, off site, or facing the public.

Test the escalation out of hours and record that you did. An untested path is an assumption. A tested one, with a date against it, is evidence that the arrangements are more than paperwork.

Review the whole thing after any incident and at a fixed interval. A lone worker assessment written once and filed is the version that gets read out in an investigation.

Frequently asked questions

Do I legally need a lone worker device?

No specific device is mandated. The duty is to assess the risk and put suitable arrangements in place. For some situations a check-in procedure satisfies that; for others, nothing short of a monitored service will.

What is BS 8484?

The British Standard for the provision of lone worker services, currently the 2022 edition. It covers the supplier, the device, training and the Alarm Receiving Centre, and accreditation is what allows an ARC to obtain a URN for direct police response.

Can a LoRaWAN button replace a monitored service?

Only where the risk is a known-location alarm answered by your own staff. It has no GPS, no fall detection and no external monitoring, so it does not cover mobile workers, off-site work or incapacitation.

What about mobile phones?

Useful and already in everyone’s pocket, but they need to be reachable, charged, in coverage and operable by someone who may be injured or under threat. They are a supplement to a lone worker plan, not the plan.

How often should the risk assessment be reviewed?

Whenever there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or there has been a significant change, which is what the regulations require. In practice, review after any incident, any change to staffing or premises, and at a fixed annual interval.

The short version

Write the assessment, decide what would have to happen for someone to be found quickly, and only then choose hardware. A LoRaWAN button is a sound, inexpensive answer for fixed positions on your own site. If the risk involves mobile staff, public violence or incapacitation, you need a BS 8484 service, and being honest about that distinction is the most useful thing a supplier can do.

For related site safety measurement, our guides to real-time dust monitoring and COSHH and noise monitoring cover the exposure duties that sit alongside this, and what LoRaWAN is explains the network the button runs on.

The Milesight WS101 smart button is priced and in stock. Add it to a quote and we will come back within one working day.