THE THREE-FUNCTION ADAPTIVE PERSONAL SAFETY ARCHITECTURE (TF-APSA)

AbstractSexual violence, threatened assault, interpersonal violence, bullying, accidents, and other emergencies can require rapid communication and coordinated assistance. Existing personal safety approaches may depend on a user's ability to access a telephone, maintain network connectivity, communicate a location, or obtain a timely response from another person or institution. A safety device may successfully transmit an alert without ensuring that the alert is received or that meaningful assistance follows.This paper proposes the Three-Function Adaptive Personal Safety Architecture (TF-APSA), a gender-inclusive conceptual framework centered on sexual-violence threat and attempted-rape response as its primary analytical case. The proposed architecture contains three functions: Universal Emergency Signalling (UES), Immediate Non-Injurious Protective Response (INPR), and Last-Resort Sexual-Violence Safety Response (LSSR). The functions are coordinated but are not required to operate as a rigid sequence. The first is intended for serious emergencies involving the user or another person. The second concerns immediate, non-injurious protective assistance. The third concerns the continuation of protective communication and emergency support when a sexual- violence threat persists or earlier response pathways fail.The paper formalizes the proposed system boundary, operating states, variables, communication events, reliability measures, failure conditions, research hypotheses, evaluation criteria, privacy constraints, and interdisciplinary applications. It also proposes a portfolio of thirty secondary cases and a traceability framework linking those cases to the primary case.The contribution is a structured research architecture rather than a claim of a newly proven universal law. Originality, technical feasibility, usability, social effectiveness, and crime-reduction outcomes remain research questions requiring literature review, prior-art comparison, simulation, ethical review, and empirical evaluation.Keywords: personal safety; emergency signalling; sexual violence; wearable safety systems; adaptive architecture; emergency response; reliability engineering; privacy engineering; formal systems; criminology; public policy