Wouldn’t it be nice to have a guardian angel watching over us? A small cuddly being, whose only job was to make sure we avoided scrapes and minimize our pain in times of trouble. Of course this is all rather fanciful thinking, unless your name is Justin Bieber and you have a nice chap called Mike/Joe/Pete permanently on your shoulder, but it’s nice to dream.

CRADAR doesn’t promise to fix your owies or stop you from having accidents, but it can do the next best thing. Once installed on your Android smartphone, it will constantly monitor the phone’s accelerometer for any severe disturbance, and if it detects a fall or a crash, it will wait for a pre-set time and then send an emergency SMS message to your choice of recipient, complete with a link to a Google Map with a GPS location pin set to show where you are.

Once the fall has been detected, the phone also starts ringing and vibrating to alert anyone nearby (probably not so good if you’re in bear country) and then if you move more than 8 feet or tap the ‘I’m OK’ button within the set time, cancels the alert and goes back to monitoring mode. You can set a custom message (up to a max of 48 characters) and you can also tweak the sensitivity settings to match your phone’s particular accelerometer.

This is a great app for hikers, cyclists and anyone else who is vulnerable to falls or accident situations. Perhaps the only thing it could do with is a couple of more contacts so the alert could cascade to others in case the first is not available. Nice.

Android Market .