Hacking solo on the South Downs, schooling alone in the arena before the lesson, a teenager riding out from the yard while the parent's at work. Falls from horse are higher-impact, longer airborne, more lateral than the standing fall every other safety app is trained on. Vygard Equine learned the right profile.
Apple Watch on, tap Start Ride. We log route, gait via accelerometer, and arm the fall classifier. Battery cost is about 6%/hour — fine for a typical 2-hour hack.
Distinct impact signature triggers a 30-second 'Are you OK?' haptic on the watch. Tap if you're fine — most riders are within seconds. If you don't, SOS fires.
Your nominated contact gets a live pin + the planned route. Remote bridleways are noted ('past Hawthorn Farm, 200m off the bridleway in the woods') so help knows where to go.
No clever onboarding to dig through, no settings menu to find. Open the app, see one big button. Tap it. Get on with the hack. The whole UI is built around “your hands are on the reins, not the phone”.
Higher-G impact + lateral motion + extended airborne phase — distinct signature that generic apps train against as 'noise' and miss.
OS bridleway data baked in. SOS includes nearest bridleway access point + access road for emergency services who don't know rural Sussex by heart.
Watch can take a kick to the wrist + going through a stream. Sensors keep functioning, classifier doesn't false-fire on the spray.
Cardiac event during a ride (rare but real for older riders) is a different signal from a fall. We catch both.
If 5 riders from the same yard are wearing it, we ping the yard manager if anyone has an event — not just the rider's named contact. Mutual aid for liveries.
Fall + no response → both fire at once. Your partner can drive to the location while emergency services route via the access road.
Riders need kit that survives a stream crossing, a muddy school, the inevitable horseshoe-to-wrist. Apple Watch + Garmin Fenix are the two we test against. Phone goes in the saddlebag — no need to dig it out mid-hack.
Free install for both phone + watch. Vygard never sells data to insurers, breeders, or competition organisers. Yard managers see only their own riders unless those riders explicitly opt in.
Every Vygard Personal app is designed so the vast majority of alerts cost us nothing to send. SMS and WhatsApp — which we'd otherwise burn at 3-5p per message — kick in only as an emergency fallback. That's why the apps stay at £4.99/mo.
If your contact has any Vygard app installed, they get a push notification with the alert + a tap-to-call button. Instant, no SMS cost.
If they don't have a Vygard app, your phone's own Messages app opens with a pre-filled SOS text + a one-tap install link. iMessage and RCS deliver it for free.
If your contact can't be reached any other way — or it's a genuine unconscious SOS where you can't tap — Vygard sends an SMS via Twilio. Counted against your monthly allowance.
Parallel path to SMS for contacts who use WhatsApp as their primary messenger. Same counting, same allowance pot.
Sized for ~5 SOS events per month at 4 messages each. Most users never get close to the cap. If your allowance runs out mid-month, the app falls back to opening your phone's Messages composer instead of blocking the alert — your safety is never gated on a billing limit.
Top-ups are monthly add-ons in your account settings — cancel anytime, no contract.
Per-user SMS cost is the biggest variable expense in any consumer safety app. If we shipped "unlimited SMS" on a £4.99 sub, we'd have to choose between losing money on heavy users or making the cap dishonest. By being explicit upfront — push-first, native handoff, then metered SMS — we keep the sub price low for everyone, and the people who do need more (frequent travellers, large family groups) pay a fair top-up.
Full breakdown in the FAQEquestrian injuries are common (BHS estimates ~70k UK A&E visits/year from horse-related accidents) and underserved — every consumer safety app trains its fall detector on standing falls. The same accelerometer profile that catches an 80-year-old slipping in the kitchen completely misses a rider going over their horse's head into a hedge. Equine builds the missing classifier.
Vygard Equine supplements correct riding kit (helmet, body protector, riding boots) and the discipline of telling someone where you're hacking — it does not replace either. The classifier is tuned for falls from a moving horse onto natural ground or an arena surface; falls inside a stable, mounting falls and ground-handling injuries may produce signatures that don't cleanly trigger. Press SOS manually if you can.
We'll email when Vygard Equine ships (Available now). No spam, one email, you're first in line.