Hardware-Integrated vs. App-Based: Understanding the Trade-Offs
Compare hardware-integrated and app-based panic button systems for schools. Learn the trade-offs in reliability, coverage, and emergency response performance. School safety leaders evaluating emergency systems face a major choice between hardware-integrated infrastructure or app-based software solutions. Both approaches have advocates. Both claim reliability. But they make very different assumptions about what reliable functionality means during […]
Why More Features Isn’t Always Better
When people evaluate emergency devices, one question comes up often: On the surface, more capability sounds better. But in practice, every feature comes with a trade-off, especially when it comes to battery life, reliability, and day-to-day usability. The trade-off most people don’t see Devices with GPS, cellular radios, or always-on communication require significantly more power. […]
The Rescue Card Platform Is Here
Punch Rescue announces the commercial availability of its unified emergency communication system — built for real conditions, not ideal ones. The Rescue Card system is now commercially available. Punch Rescue offers this unified emergency communication infrastructure for K-12 schools, healthcare facilities, and corporate campuses. It combines wearable panic button hardware, a dedicated LoRa mesh network, […]
Why Apps Aren’t Enough: Building the Emergency Infrastructure Schools Actually Need
After years deploying panic button apps to schools, we learned speed and reliability are critical. Here’s why we built Punch Rescue’s emergency communication infrastructure. First we built a panic button app. Then we learned what emergencies actually demand, and redesigned everything. As CEO of Punch Technologies, Greg Artzt spent years building and deploying the PunchAlert […]
The Emergency Card: Built to Last
Emergency devices shouldn’t create more work, but many do. In most systems, cards are replaced regularly, sometimes every year. That creates ongoing operational overhead for IT teams and staff, along with unnecessary disruption. The Rescue Card was designed differently. Built for Longevity, Not Replacement Each card uses two replaceable CR2032 batteries that last approximately one […]
What K–12 Panic Button Laws Actually Require — And Why Most Schools Aren’t Meeting the Standard
West Virginia’s legislature sent Alyssa’s Law to Governor Patrick Morrisey’s desk on March 10 with a unanimous 93–0 vote. House Bill 4798 mandates wearable panic buttons for teachers and school staff, direct 911 connectivity, campus-wide lockdown triggering via intercoms and strobe lights, annual training, and coordination with local law enforcement. A dedicated state school safety […]
A Growing Library of Safety Resources
Building a reliable emergency response system doesn’t start with hardware. It starts with understanding the problem clearly.
The Shared-Network Problem: What K-12 Safety Administrators Need to Know About Emergency Communication Infrastructure
When panic button systems depend on the same network everyone else is using, a crisis can silence the very tools designed to address it. A Road Race Changed How America Thinks About Emergency Networks On April 15, 2013, two bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. In the minutes that followed, cell […]
Why We Do What We Do
The purpose of a dedicated emergency device is to reduce that friction to a single, reliable action. But the button itself isn’t the solution.
Built to Make IT’s Job Easier, By Design
Emergency systems shouldn’t create more work for IT teams. Too often, they do. Punch Rescue’s system was built to reduce operational burden, not add to it. In fact, one competitor’s customer described our platform as “the first self-managed emergency system.” From a single cloud-based console, IT teams can: There’s no complex maintenance cycle.There’s no constant […]
Built to Stay Online When Power Goes Out
Power outages are often part of emergency situations, but most communication systems aren’t built to handle them. Our emergency communication network is. Every part of our system is designed to continue operating when traditional infrastructure fails: When power and Wi-Fi go down, our system continues to function by: This means alerts, coordination, and communication can […]
Patent-Pending
At the heart of Punch Rescue lies a breakthrough in emergency architecture. We’ve filed a patent around our unique infrastructure design, giving safety teams an unmatched level of visibility and dependability in high-stakes situations. What makes it different? This dual-network design… real-time awareness on one signal, emergency mesh communication on another… is core to our […]