My mother is old and has caregivers that come for 12 hrs a day. However they have been really unreliable and sometimes goes hours without a caregiver showing up at her apartment. I would like to monitor when they show up and leave. I have no devices other than a wifi router currently in her apartment. She has trouble with memory and paranoia. So if I leave a device like a raspberry pi and she finds it… She doesn’t remember I put it there and throws it in the trash because “the man” is spying on her. lol
My original thought was to have a button they push when they arrive and leave. However sometimes caregivers aren’t the same ones that show up everyday and the temporary new ones wouldn’t understand they need to do this. So I have been trying to come up with a way to keep track of their comings and goings. There is no power source at the front door, so a battery solution that lasts a long time would be ideal. I am ok with long delays in reporting the door opened since I am just going to setup automation that if the door hasn’t opened within the morning schedule after a certain time I know to call the agency. I am also not sure how to connect in remotely to my network. So a cloud solution service is ok, better if it was free. I am open to hiding something under her bed since there is a plug on the wall… so I could do a rpi and some usb zigbee or zwave solution.
I’ll try to sum up my trouble points:
- Hard for me to go out to her home (distance), so solution needs to be solid where I am not replacing batteries all the time or rebooting devices.
- She almost never leaves the home, the goal is to best guess when a caregiver arrives and leaves.
- Its an apartment, I can’t make physical changes.
- Her isp gives her a dhcp ip address, which changes occasionally
- I run pfsense at my home and have a static ip and run wireguard vpn server on pfsense.
- Caregivers arrive roughly around 11am to wake her up and get her day going
- Caregivers leave roughly at 11pm after they put her to bed
- Open to stashing a device somewhere that is hard to find in hopes it survives
- Cloud solutions are ok, better if there is no cost
- Want to integrate in to my home assistant to create automation
- Not huge fan of exposing my mqtt server to the internet, but open to running another server in a vm and bridging so only that one topic is exposed.
- Ideally not running HA at her apartment, but linking in to mine somehow.
- Mounting a door sensor that is purchased and looks normal won’t be thrown in the trash. Finding my rpi not in case resulted in someone is spying on me and was thrown away. Basically the less DIY it looks the more likely it will survive.
- I am the lessee of the apartment, my mom pays me rent with social security to cover half of it. So no issue with me leaving devices around or whatever. Its just hard because she doesn’t remember and the paranoia kicks in.
I tried to provide as much helpful info as I could think of. Really just looking for ideas I can pursue. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Thanks!