True Guardian’s pendant-like call device was developed to help teachers and school systems respond to emergencies in real time.

Albert Steed, True Guardian’s president, said conversations around the product’s development began in mid-2024, sparked by the news of a school shooting.

Steed leads Hampstead-based firm True IP Solutions, alongside Brian Hales and his father, Michael. The company provides telecommunications and security services to institutional users, such as school systems.

They saw the need for a new tool that would allow teachers to alert other school leaders and law enforcement during an emergency, said Albert Steed.

Existing school security tools often require teachers to download an app onto their personal phones and involve multiple devices. True Guardian saw an opportunity to consolidate the capabilities of access control, along with audio and video streaming and recording, into a single device.

The product went through several iterations. An early version was about a foot long and resembled a remote control. Over its development, the pendant has gotten more compact, Albert Steed said.

The device features two buttons. Pressing one button opens up video streaming and two-way audio capabilities, allowing a teacher to talk with and broadcast video to a designated emergency responder within the school. The other button is more like triggering a “silent alarm,” Albert Steed said, by opening video broadcasting and one-way audio.

“The two-way would be somebody’s having a medical emergency, I need to talk to somebody,” Albert Steed said. “The other is more of like a fight, a shooter situation … they can hear what you’re talking about, but nothing they say is going to broadcast back to that actual pendant. If somebody’s hunkered down in a classroom, you don’t necessarily want this thing beeping and making a lot of noise.”

The pendant also maps the locations of teachers inside a school building in real time and can be used as an access control device to lock down a school. The audio and video recorded by the pendant would be stored in a data center, Albert Steed said, for law enforcement to use.

“What we do today, adding cameras and access control in schools, we never have 100% coverage,” Hales said. “But with events that happen today, we have to be conscious of, ‘Hey, if something happens off camera, it’s our word against your word’ kind of thing. So these devices help alleviate that.”

True Guardian is an entity separate from True IP Solutions, Albert Steed said, to allow other telecommunications and security service providers to integrate their own software and systems into the pendant.

The company is starting to do some proof-of-concept work with its current prototype, and a local school has committed to testing the pendant in its system starting in the fall, said Hales. Feedback from that proof-of-concept will play a major role in shaping the final product, Albert Steed said.

The development of True Guardian’s product and platform has been fully funded through True IP Solutions, Albert Steed said. In the next year, he added, they hope to add full-time employees to support True Guardian.

Company officials also see potential uses beyond the classroom. Anyone with a customer-facing role could use the device, Albert Steed said, from those in local government positions to HVAC technicians and Realtors.

“It feels like,” he said, “there’s a lot of interesting use cases that we’re just going to continue to uncover and uncover as we talk to more people and more people look at it.”