Care Window

Inspiration

Quiet periods in a household can deserve a calm human check-in without turning a motion sensor into a person detector. Care Window keeps consent and uncertainty visible.

What it does

The opt-in engine records motion as activity evidence, supports manual check-ins, and raises a bounded “manual check-in” window after a configurable quiet period. Device availability is treated separately: an offline device makes monitoring unavailable rather than implying inactivity. Revoking consent clears activity evidence.

How we built it

The preserved Python engine is a small in-memory state machine with explicit event and command validation. The offline demo ports the same transitions to a plain JavaScript Engine class, with a deterministic clock, a synthetic fixture, reset, raw JSON inspection, and accessible cards/timeline. The Local MVP includes a standard-library HTTP host for local inspection.

Challenges

The important design challenge was avoiding false certainty: inactivity is not an emergency, motion is not identity, and an offline sensor is not silence. Keeping revocation as a privacy boundary also required clearing historical activity fields.

What we learned

Small, explicit state transitions make consent, device health, and check-in state easier to inspect. A visible audit timeline is more useful than presenting a single alarm-like status.

Accomplishments

We packaged the original project behavior, a self-contained browser demonstration, a local Python runtime, and parity-oriented verification assets without external services or device claims.

Next steps

A real product would require formal consent UX, threat modeling, accessibility review, duplicate/replay handling, notification policy, and official Ring integration review before any deployment.

Honest verification limits

The included tests exercise the preserved Python engine, local HTTP boundaries, and the JavaScript port against a finite corpus. Browser checks cover local file and static HTTP use. This is not official Ring validation, medical/welfare verification, a production security review, or exhaustive device testing. No personal experience, production metric, or official certification is claimed.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python
• sqlite
• unittest
• urllib