Wandering alerts tuned to your parent's actual routine.
A door alarm that goes off every time somebody takes the bins out gets switched off within a week. Useful wandering detection has to know the difference between a normal exit and a concerning one.
Why generic door alarms fail
The standard approach is a contact sensor that chimes on every door event. It works for about a fortnight, at which point the family has been woken by the cat, the postman and their own late-night arrival enough times that the alarm gets disabled or ignored.
The information that makes a door event meaningful is contextual: who opened it, at what hour, whether that person normally goes out at that hour, whether they came back, and whether the pattern of the last few nights has been drifting.
What we do instead
The hub knows who lives in the home and recognises regular caregivers, so a carer arriving at 8am is not an event. It knows the household's established night-time pattern from the learning period, so getting up once at 2am for the bathroom is not an event if that is normal.
What does raise an alert is a monitored person approaching or opening an exterior door at an hour they never do, repeated pacing between rooms at night, or a departure without a return. Those alerts bypass quiet hours.
Night-time restlessness is also tracked as a trend rather than only as an incident, because increasing sundowning and disrupted sleep are among the earliest measurable signals that something is changing.
What this does not do
This is an in-home system. It tells you promptly that someone has left and gives you a timestamped frame — it does not track a person once they are outside. If GPS location tracking is your requirement, a dedicated wearable tracker is the right tool and we will say so.
We also do not lock anyone in. The system observes and notifies; door locks it can control are for your convenience, not for confinement.
