Solo skiers, small off-piste groups, anyone schooling alone in the morning before the lifts open. Vygard Ski adds three independent safety layers: avalanche stillness detection (buried but heart still beating), hard fall on piste, and a lost-on-mountain check-in if you stop moving during ski hours.
Either solo or pair with your group's watches. We track each person — heart-rate, position, altitude, and accelerometer at 50 Hz.
(a) Hard fall on piste — distinct from a gentle tumble. (b) Avalanche stillness — motionless under load + HR still present. (c) Lost on mountain — no movement for >30 min during ski hours.
Hard fall → group + chosen contact. Avalanche signal → group + Pisteurs Secours + 112 simultaneously. Lost-on-mountain → quiet check first, then escalate.
No clever onboarding to dig through, no settings menu to find. Open the app, see one big button. Tap it. Get on with the day on the snow. The whole UI is built around “your hands are on the poles, not the phone”.
Motionless + under load (pressure on the watch from snow) + heart-rate present = buried. The classifier is conservative — false-fire to a Pisteurs callout is bad.
Distinguishes 'tumble in fresh powder' (no alert) from 'high-G impact face-first into ice' (fall registered, group notified).
No movement for 30 minutes during ski hours = quiet ping. No response in 5 minutes = group + Pisteurs Secours.
On-piste skiing routes alerts to the resort's Pisteurs. Off-piste skiing routes to the local rescue helicopter number for the region.
Burial heart-rate looks distinctive — we use that as one of the avalanche signals. Stay calm matters.
On a group of 4, everyone sees everyone's status. If one person stops responding, the other 3 know immediately — they're closest.
Most consumer watches throttle at -10°C. Apple Watch Ultra and Garmin Fenix both keep going to -20°C and below. The phone stays in an inside pocket where it stays warm — but the watch does the real work.
App is free; cold-rated hardware is your call. We strongly recommend pairing Vygard with a real avalanche transceiver for any off-piste — the app does not transmit on the 457 kHz transceiver band.
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 FAQAvalanche transceivers (DVA / ARVA) are non-negotiable for off-piste — but most resort skiers don't carry one because the perceived risk on-piste is low. The actual data shows that hard falls + sudden weather changes + group separation cause more injuries than avalanche events on European pistes. Vygard Ski catches the in-bounds risks that transceivers were never designed for.
Vygard Ski is NOT an avalanche transceiver — it doesn't transmit on the 457 kHz standard band and cannot be searched for by an existing DVA. Off-piste skiers must carry a real transceiver, shovel and probe; the app is a complementary layer for the heart-rate-present detection during burial, not a replacement for the standard kit. On-piste safety still relies on Pisteurs Secours response times — we shorten the notify-Pisteurs leg, not the response leg.
We'll email when Vygard Ski ships (Available now). No spam, one email, you're first in line.