CareCircle for Alexa+

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  CareCircle for Alexa+: care for your loved one, just by talking

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  An emergency: Alexa alerts the family and says when to call for help

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  Searches the live web, and health questions get general info only, never prescriptions

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  "Did my mom take her medicines today?" Alexa checks the log with an MCP tool

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  Live answers too: real-time weather for any city

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  Echo Show style care screen, built as an MCP App

Inspiration Many of us have a parent who lives alone while the family lives in other cities. Every day we worry: Did she take her pills? Is she okay? Phone calls don't scale, and older parents rarely open apps. Talking is easy, though. So we asked, 'What if Alexa could be the family's caring helper at home?'

What it does CareCircle is an Alexa+ add-on for families caring for a loved one. You just talk to it.

"I took my blood pressure pill" logs the dose, and the family dashboard shows it as taken. "Did Mom take her medicines today?" lists what's taken and what's still missing. "Mom fell in the bathroom" saves a care note, alerts the family, and tells her to call emergency services if it's serious. "Show me Mom's care screen" shows an Echo Show-style screen, built as an MCP app. It is also a full assistant: live weather, web search, news, Wikipedia facts and the time, and it remembers the conversation. You can interrupt Alexa any time, even while she is speaking or thinking. She listens and combines everything you said. Safe by design: for health questions it gives general information only. It never tells anyone to start, stop or change a medicine, and it suggests asking a doctor or pharmacist. How we built it CareCircle MCP server (Node.js, @modelcontextprotocol/sdk, Streamable HTTP) with 12 tools: 6 care tools (log_medication, check_medication_status, add_care_note, alert_family, get_daily_summary, show_care_dashboard) and 6 live tools (search_web, read_webpage, get_weather, get_current_time, look_up_facts, get_news). MCP App: show_care_dashboard links to a ui://carecircle/today.html resource (text/html;profile=mcp-app), shown in a sandboxed frame like an Echo Show. Amazon Nova 2 Lite on Amazon Bedrock (Converse API with tool calling) is the "Alexa brain". It acts as an MCP client, picks tools, and writes the answers. Simulated Alexa+ web app: Alexa+ add-ons aren't available in India yet, so we built an Echo-style page using the browser's speech recognition and speech synthesis, with always-on listening, barge-in and echo filtering. Live data: DuckDuckGo or Tavily for web search, Open-Meteo, Wikipedia and Google News. None of these need a key. Hosting: Render, with per-visitor rate limits to protect the Bedrock budget. Challenges we ran into Region and model access: our free-plan AWS account is locked to Sydney (ap-southeast-2). The model we tried first returned AccessDenied, and the AU inference profile ID was invalid. We found the working global.amazon.nova-2-lite-v1:0 profile in the Bedrock playground. MCP Apps SDK versions: the ext-apps package needs the newer v2 server SDK, so we implemented the MCP App pattern by hand (the ui:// resource plus tool _meta) on SDK 1. x. Natural voice conversation: Alexa kept "hearing" her own voice through the mic. We added echo detection, a barge-in that stops her speech, and request cancelling, so a question asked mid-answer combines with the earlier one. Being helpful without being unsafe: we wanted it to answer any health question but never act like a doctor. Careful system rules handle this, with a clear emergency path. Accomplishments that we're proud of It truly feels like talking to Alexa: interrupt it, change the topic, misspell words, and it still understands. A real MCP server and an MCP app live on the internet for anyone to try. What we learned How MCP tools, resources and MCP apps fit together, and how an LLM decides which tool to call. How to use Bedrock's Converse API for multi-step tool calling. That voice UX is mostly about timing: silence detection, interruptions and echo. What's next for CareCircle? Publish it as a real Alexa+ add-on when the toolkit reaches India. Real SMS or WhatsApp alerts to family members through Amazon SNS. Medicine reminders at set times and support for several family members and languages (Hindi, Kannada). Try it live: https://carecircle-rm1e.onrender.com Code: https://github.com/Pratheeksh-7S/Carecircle

Built With

• alexa
• amazon-bedrock
• amazon-nova
• amazon-web-services
• css3
• duckduckgo
• express.js
• html5
• javascript
• mcp
• model-context-protoco
• node.js
• open-meteo
• open-meteo-forecast
• render
• web-speech-api