Still Here

The house checks in, so family doesn't have to.

Still Here watches a Ring household the way a good neighbour would: it learns what an ordinary day looks like, notices when the day stops looking ordinary, and — this is the part that matters — knocks before it alarms. It plays a chime and treats any sign of life as an answer. Family is only pulled in when the home itself could not get one.

Built for the Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon, Ring track (priority categories: caretaking, accessibility).

Watch the demo | Devpost submission

---

Why knock first

Every "is mum okay?" product on the market solves the easy half — detect an anomaly, send a push notification. In a real household that design fails twice a week: she slept in, she was in the garden, the cat set off the hallway camera. After the third false alarm the family mutes the app, and the app is now worse than nothing.

So Still Here spends its first move on the home, not the phone:

Phase	What happens	Who is disturbed
calm	rhythm matches history	nobody
knocking	chime plays on the Ring chime — "are you there?"	only the person at home
answered	any motion, doorbell press or door event after the chime	nobody — the incident closes silently
escalated	two unanswered knocks	family, with evidence

The person at home answers by walking past a camera. No phone, no app, no button — which is exactly why it works for the people this is built for.

---

What it uses from the Ring Partner API

Purpose	Endpoint
Learn the household rhythm	GET /v1/history/devices/{id}/events
Watch in real time	webhook v1.1 (motion_detected, button_press, device_offline), verified with X-Signature HMAC-SHA256
Knock	POST /v1/devices/{id}/media/audio/playback (audio_ref, requires Chime Controls)
Evidence on escalation	POST /v1/devices/{id}/media/image/download — one still, only at escalation
Optional live check	POST /v1/devices/{id}/media/streaming/whep/sessions (WHEP/WebRTC)
Inventory & health	GET /v1/devices, /status, /capabilities, /configurations, GET /v1/users/me

Devices are mapped to roles (front_door, indoor, chime) rather than model names, so the engine reasons about "the front door opened", not about a particular Ring SKU.

---

Run it

npm install
npm run dev            # http://localhost:3000

That starts in sandbox mode: 14 days of synthetic history, a replayable day, and four scenarios you can trigger from the dashboard. Every simulated event is POSTed to the real /api/webhook/ring route with a real HMAC signature, so the demo exercises the same verify → parse → engine path as production traffic.

Point it at a real Ring account

1. Open the Ring Developer Playground → Generate Token.
2. cp .env.example .env.local and paste the token into RING_ACCESS_TOKEN.
3. Check what the account exposes:

   npx tsx scripts/ring-probe.ts

4. curl -X POST localhost:3000/api/live — the dashboard reloads with real devices, real history and a rhythm learned from that household.

Playground tokens last about 30 minutes. For a long-running deployment use the OAuth refresh token flow and set RING_WEBHOOK_SECRET so webhook signatures are enforced (they are mandatory when NODE_ENV=production).

---

How the rhythm model works

lib/rhythm/model.ts reduces event history to four things a caregiver can sanity-check on the dashboard:

• first presence and last presence per local day → median and MAD (a single 3am bathroom trip must not redefine "morning")
• hourly presence probability → also gives us quiet hours, so the home never knocks at 4am
• p90 waking gap → how long this particular household normally goes quiet mid-day

lib/rhythm/engine.ts is a pure function of (state, events, model, now). It produces knock / escalate / resolve actions and nothing else — no timers, no I/O — which is why the escalation policy is covered by unit tests rather than hope:

npm test        # 22 tests

Guards that come from that test suite:

• never alerts on fewer than 7 learned days (isConfident)
• never knocks during learned quiet hours
• gives someone who left through the front door an away-grace before worrying
• ignores non-human motion (sub_type: vehicle) as a sign of life
• stands down even after escalating, if she walks past a camera at 11:03

---

Privacy, deliberately

• No continuous recording, no stored video. A single still is pulled only at escalation.
• The knock is a chime, not a microphone — nothing is listened to.
• Household state is a rhythm model plus one day of events: a few kilobytes, in memory, never sold, never sent anywhere except the family message.
• Webhook payloads are rejected unless the HMAC signature verifies.

---

The message, and the gate in front of it

The family message is assembled deterministically first (lib/notify/summary.ts) — the concern, the last sign of life, what the home already tried. A model is then asked to rephrase that evidence, in this order:

1. Ollama on the home hub (llama3.1:8b by default) — the description of your mother's morning never leaves her house
2. Amazon Bedrock, if the household has cloud configured
3. the deterministic sentence, which is never wrong

Every draft has to clear a fact gate before it is allowed near a family:

The last sign of life was at 08:16.   ← pre-written; the model must copy it verbatim
06:44, 08:16, 11:00                   ← the only clock times allowed to appear

This is not theoretical. During development the local model turned "14 days learned" into "last sign of life was 14 days ago" — in a message to a worried family. The gate rejects that draft and the rules version ships instead; tests/summary.test.ts keeps that exact sentence as a regression test.

OLLAMA_MODEL=llama3.1:8b            # optional, this is the default
AWS_REGION=us-east-1                # optional cloud path
BEDROCK_MODEL_ID=anthropic.claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022-v2:0

---

Layout

app/
  api/webhook/ring/    signature verification → parse → engine
  api/household/       everything the dashboard polls
  api/sim/             replay a scenario through the signed webhook path
  api/live/            switch to a real Ring account
  page.tsx             the caregiver dashboard
lib/
  ring/                API client, webhook types, HMAC verification
  rhythm/              rhythm model + watch engine (pure, tested)
  sim/                 synthetic household: 14 days of history + four scenarios
  notify/              family message (rules, optionally rephrased by Bedrock)
scripts/ring-probe.ts  inspect a real account from the terminal

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.