A smart home and two apps, built for a couple in their late seventies

A couple in their late seventies lives in a large house with more switches, sensors and remotes than anyone should have to remember. ElevAIte tied together five different smart home systems, built the alerts that matter for safety, and wrote two apps sized for the people who use them.

What we built

1. Five smart home systems working together, with Home Assistant running more than two dozen automations for lighting, morning and evening routines, and alerts, plus one dashboard for the whole house.
2. A bathroom nightlight that holds at a low level from after sunset until sunrise, on a schedule rather than a motion sensor, because it exists to prevent falls and a missed sensor reading is not acceptable.
3. Water leak alerts from 12 sensors, pushed to three phones with the room named, and an all-clear when the area dries.
4. A watchdog that pushes an alert when a sensor has gone quiet for three hours, so a dead sensor gets noticed instead of failing silently.
5. A house-manuals app: every appliance manual in one place behind large pictures. Ask a question in plain English and it answers from that appliance's manual and says which page to read. They open it whenever they need to look something up.
6. A jukebox app on top of Apple Music. Tap a card and the app builds a playlist that plays in any of the house's 13 audio zones. The family uses it.

Measured first, then built

The routines started from the house's own history. The first version of the morning lighting turned itself off after 60 minutes. The history showed the gap between getting up and settling in ranged from 7 to 74 minutes, so the lights now stay on until the morning routine has visibly started, or until well after sunrise, instead of a fixed timer.

Measuring mattered for the alerts too. One sensor type only reports when a door opens, so a long silence meant nobody used that door, not that the sensor had died. The test that tells the difference is the battery report, which those sensors send on a schedule.

Built for the people using it

Both apps use large print and plain words. The manuals app shows pictures of the appliances, not model numbers. The jukebox talks like a jukebox and never mentions technology.

Why this is on a business site

It is the same work we do for a business, at a smaller scale: find out how people actually behave, build around that, and alert a person when something breaks. A follow-up system that answers leads is built the same way.

Names and location withheld.