CareCircle

Inspiration

Many older adults take three or four medications a day, often living alone or far from their children. Today families find out whether a dose was taken with a phone call — if someone picks up. Apps and pill-box alarms assume a smartphone; a voice assistant doesn't. We wanted the check-in to be as easy as saying a sentence out loud.

What it does

CareCircle is a self-hosted MCP server that gives Alexa+ a simple medication ledger shared by an elder and their family:

Family sets up: "Alexa, Dad takes Amlodipine 5mg at 8 am and 8 pm." → add_medication
Elder checks in: "Alexa, I took my BP tablet." → log_dose matches the medicine loosely and snaps it to the closest scheduled time
Family asks: "Alexa, did Dad take his medicines today?" → check_status returns every dose as taken / missed / upcoming, and daily_summary gives a short, caring spoken summary ("Missed: Metformin at 13:00. You may want to give Dad a call.")

A dose counts as missed when nothing is logged within 2 hours of its scheduled time.

How we built it

Official MCP Python SDK 2.x (MCPServer), served over Streamable HTTP at /mcp, negotiating protocol 2025-11-25
SQLite (stdlib) for storage — no external services, runs anywhere with uv run server.py
Tools accept an optional ISO now, so behaviour is deterministic in tests and demos
An automated test covers the taken / missed / upcoming logic; we verified the server end-to-end with an MCP client and the MCP Inspector

Challenges we ran into

The SDK's 2.x release renamed FastMCP to MCPServer and moved host/port from the constructor to run(), so most tutorials no longer work as written. Matching spoken medicine names ("my BP tablet") to a schedule also needed care: we match loosely, and fall back to the only medicine when a person has just one.

What we learned

MCP makes the "Alexa skill" part tiny: we only describe tools in plain Python with good docstrings, and the assistant handles language. The hard part of voice-first care is designing replies that are short, unambiguous and kind.

What's next

Proactive nudges at dose time and alerts to family on a missed dose
Multiple caregivers per person with consent controls
Refill tracking ("3 days of Metformin left")
Ring integration for caretaking: a missed dose plus no front-door activity escalates a check-in

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/aakarshitv/carecircle