Any recommendations for offline notifications (sms etc)?

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1

Hi there.
I’m looking for some recommendations/advise on an alert/notification which can be sent from HA to multiple mobile devices.

I have my own HA at home (UK) and use Tailscale, sometimes ZeroTier for remote connection.
My plan is to set up an HA instance at my elderly mum’s. Partially as an assistant for her but mainly as as an warning mechanism for me and my siblings.

She has an alert/panic button thing, but she doesn’t like wearing it and she did have a fall not too long ago, but was too weak (covid) to get back up for a day or so. She didn’t use the alert button as she didn’t want to be a bother.
sigh … mums eh!?

So I decided to remove some of our concern by setting up motion tracking with HA to make sure she’s still bipping about her house during the day. She’ll have automated switches and lights, but really I’m putting it in there to make sure she’s ok.

All the bits came this week and I’m pretty much done prebuilding the bones of it ready to be installed the next time I’m up North, but I’m now at the point of looking into the best way for us to be notified if she’s not triggered occupancy in too long and this is where I need some help/advise.

My HA app will be connected 100% to my own HA as HA doesn’t allow multiple server connections, so my only access will be via web. I’ll setup my siblings with the HA client, so they might get normal HA notifications, but if their Tailscale isn’t connected or they have no wifi then that won’t work for us.

I’d looked at some options and email would be an option in a pinch … if I/we looked at it often enough and there was an audible alert, but thanks to spam our emails are usually ignored until later, so SMS is possibly the best option for speedy alerting? I’m not sure what other reliable options there are tbh

I was wondering if anyone’s done something like this already and how they find the reliability of the integration you chose?

Any help or advise would be welcome

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Check to see if your cell phone provider offers an option to send an SMS message via e-mail. I use Node Red to send an e-mail to [email protected], which is Verizon’s method.

Another option would be to use the Telegram platform to send the message to the Telegram app on your phone.

Both of those have been quite reliable for me.

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I use Node-Red Twilio. There is also a Twilio integration.

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So you’d like a solution without any wifi, right?
Purely Email/Telegram/… is not going to work, then.

Likely, an usb modem with a sim card is what you’ll head towards.
You’d be able to send SMS, and possible also use it as a failover internet access.

Don’t expect it to be easy, though. There is linux configuration involved, and if you use HAOS, it might make it even harder.

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Ta. I don’t use Node-Red, but Twilio looks interesting. I’ll have a go at that first

Mobile devices, yes as they’re the volatile/unpredictable element in messaging.
There will be 3 of us, so hopefully one of us is paying attention and can alert others if needed.

The HA instance itself will be hardwired and always on other than the occasional mid-night reboot, so no need network bond it with a MiFi router :slight_smile:

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Well, then, any notification backend would do. Just pick the one that suit you best.

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Might want to consider Actionable Notifications to allow you or your siblings to confirm they received the the message or perform some other action.

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Thanks @MaxK I’ll likely do this too just for completeness, but it will be for their phones as mine won’t be connected to my mum’s HA instance. … at least not while HA only allows 1 server connection.

@koying Thanks for the recommendation /s

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I use Twilio to send SMS and use the Alert integration to trigger alerts and compose messages. Works great.

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That’s exactly what I did as recommended by MaxK (not using NodeRed though) :slight_smile: