Most days Lifevault is a single tap that costs you three seconds. This page is about the other day — the one where the tap doesn't come, and the system has to decide what to do about it.
You pick a window — a time of day and a length. Any tap inside that window closes it. That is the entire obligation the system places on you, and there is no penalty for tapping early, tapping twice, or tapping from a different device than yesterday.
You can confirm from the phone app, a paired watch, or by replying to the reminder email. Every confirmed tap quietly updates the status your guardians see. They are not notified — they simply see a green marker if they go looking, which is the point: nobody has to ask you whether you are alright.
When a window closes without a tap, the ladder starts. Every rung below is a default; every interval is yours to change, and a single tap at any point stops the ladder dead and resets it.
One tap closes it for the day. Nobody but you is aware the window exists.
Push notification, then email. No other party is contacted or informed.
SMS and an automated call to your handset. Still nobody else is told.
One person — the highest-ranked guardian, the one you judged most likely to physically reach you — is asked to check on you.
Everyone you named, with your address, any medical notes you recorded, and who else has been contacted.
Only now do sealed items open, and only for the recipients you assigned to each one.
The design constraint is not "alert people quickly". It is alert exactly one person, as late as is still useful. A system that pages your whole family the first time you sleep through an alarm gets muted within a fortnight, and a muted system protects nobody.
So the ladder is built around three rules:
A guardian is someone who could physically get to you — not necessarily someone close to you emotionally. The neighbour with a key is often a better first contact than a sibling three hundred miles away, and the system asks you to rank them that way.
Each guardian is invited by email and must accept before they count. They can see that you use Lifevault and whether your last window closed; they cannot see your vault, your other guardians' details, or anything you have not explicitly assigned to them.
You can put the ladder on hold for a fixed period before you travel. Holds have an end date and cannot be open-ended — the system will not let you disable the thing you set it up for and then forget. Guardians are told a hold is in place and when it lifts.