Show HN: AI Baby Monitor – local Video-LLM that beeps when safety rules break

https://github.com/zeenolife/ai-baby-monitor

52•zeenolife•4d ago

Hi HN!

I built AI Baby Monitor – a tiny stack (Redis + vLLM + Streamlit) that watches a video stream and a YAML list of safety rules. If the model spots a rule being broken it plays beep sound, so you can quickly glance over and check on your baby.

Why?

When we bought a crib for our daughter, the first thing she tried was climbing over the rail :/ I got a bit paranoid about constantly watching her over, so I thought of a helper that can *actively* watch the baby, while parents could stay *semi-actively* alert. It’s meant to be an additional set of eyes, and *not* a replacement for the adult. Thus, just a beep sound and not phone notifications.

How it works

* *stream_to_redis.py* captures video stream frames → Redis streams

* *run_watcher.py* pulls the latest N frames, injects them + the rules into a prompt and hits a local *vLLM* server running *Qwen 2.5 VL*

* Model returns structured JSON (`should_alert`, `reasoning`, `awareness_level`)

* If `should_alert=True` → `playsound` beep

* Streamlit page displays both camera and LLM logs

Comments

temporarything•4d ago

Great idea! Is it possible to run this on latest Macbook Pros? No GPU unfortunately :)

dghlsakjg•3h ago

The latest MacBook pros all have gpu cores built in.

skull8888888•4d ago

why qwen 2.5 specifically?

rokset3•4d ago

will it be able to process sounds, so it can beep while baby crying? i work with music in headphones, would be nice

techjamie•4h ago

This could probably be achieved very simply by a device with a microphone and a script that just checks the noise level. Either checking for consistently high noise levels, or if you want to get fancy, maybe do some heuristic stuff to pick out crying specifically.

Might be a cool project to do with a cheap microphone and an SBC.

clarkcharlie03•4d ago

Pretty cool - I might try this with my kiddo

up-n-atom•3d ago

Perfect now we can put more good willing parents in jail for “neglect”. For every good idea, a bad idea will be born.

bilsbie•5h ago

I had this same idea for monitoring my pool while I’m away. Watching for things in pool, low or high water levels, cloudy water, stray dogs, etc.

There are actually hundreds of applications for this basic idea. Common sense applied to a video feed.

ozzydave•5h ago

I want this for pedestrians and cyclists at intersections, and particularly HAWK beacons.

csmoak•3h ago

https://www.roundabout.tech/ tackles this problem

throwup238•4h ago

There’s an entire Curb Your Enthusiasm season about that.

(Just get a fence is the conclusion)

bronco21016•4h ago

I've thought of the same for my lake shore, which is very much not a "just build a fence" situation.

We have 50 ft of lake shore with neighbors on either side. Assuming I fenced my 50 ft there is still a path around said fence on either side.

At the very most I could gate the dock, but again, there are about 8 other docs readily available.

Edmond•2h ago

try Watchman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44087499

I am the developer and happy to answer questions.

You can basically setup your own instructions and setup you own observation solutions...you can imagine everything from security to farm operations, the sky's the limit.

th3h4mm3r•5h ago

What about hardware?

dtgriscom•4h ago

Absolutely. I want a "Cat on the Counter" detector, but a) the hardware needs to be cheap, and b) it can't take more than a few seconds to analyze a frame.

alibova•4h ago

Totally doable! Raspberry pi and YOLO.

jxcole•4h ago

IANAL but I would be scared of getting sued. For example, if I try to give a perfectly good car seat to good will they refuse to take it for liability reasons. Baby safety is serious business.

worldsayshi•4h ago

Yeah it's an interesting project but it seems there should be lower stakes use cases that should be tried first.

NitpickLawyer•3h ago

> Baby safety is serious business.

Are "regular" baby monitors any more complicated than a dumbed down cheapest you can build it walkie-talkie? Society really needs to stop wanting other people to be responsible for their actions. The choice of what devices you use on your kids should first and foremost be on you. AI or no AI. Fear mongering with literal "someone think of the kids" is getting old, IMO.

itishappy•2h ago

I don't agree this is a "think of the children" issue. Nobody is saying "don't use this on your kids" they're saying "understand if by sharing this you might be exposing yourself to potential financial consequences." Baby safety is serious business.

* Summer Infant Baby Monitor Overheating Settlement – $10 million after reports of overheating monitors leading to fire hazards.

* Angelcare Monitor Recall Lawsuit – $7 million settlement due to defective cord placement that led to strangulation risks.

* Levana Baby Monitor Overheating Lawsuit – $5.5 million awarded in cases of monitors causing burns to children.

* VTech Baby Monitor Battery Defect Settlement – $6.2 million after reports of exploding batteries causing fire risks.

* Motorola Baby Monitor Signal Failure Class Action – $4.8 million settlement after claims of poor signal reception leading to missed emergencies.

* Owlet Smart Sock Monitor Lawsuit – $6.5 million awarded due to inaccurate heart rate readings that caused false alarms and panic among parents.

* Graco Digital Monitor Lawsuit – $5 million settlement after a lawsuit citing defective monitors that stopped functioning during critical moments.

* Philips Avent Baby Monitor Lawsuit – $4.2 million after several reports of overheating and potential fire hazards.

* Samsung Baby Monitor Fire Hazard Settlement – $3.5 million awarded due to incidents of overheating leading to home fires.

* Infant Optics Monitor Class Action – $4 million settlement after claims of faulty batteries and wiring causing sudden shutdowns during use.

https://www.personalinjurysandiego.org/product-liability/saf...

amelius•4h ago

Even if this fails only in 0.1% of cases, given enough users this will kill babies.

(Of course you should compare this to humans, but in any case, do the math! And get a good lawyer.)

natosaichek•3h ago

This thing will not kill babies. That's like saying seatbelts kill people because they don't save everyone in a car accident. It is precisely this attitude that prevents good things from flourishing - the idea that if something is involved however tangentially in a safety important subsystem it must have perfect results. No, we should not have this view. If something is net positive, we should promote it.

dsr_•3h ago

When people decide that the nannycam works, they will rely on it. Then, when it fails, their inaction will kill babies.

It is amazing/horrifying to me how many people are intent on reincenting the reasons why we have UL, the FDA, the FCC, traffic laws, seatbelts, electrical codes, fire marshals and unions.

icoder•3h ago

What inactions? Apart from creating safe conditions beforehand (but perhaps that is your point), once my kid is asleep there's not much more I can do? Most of that time I'm sleeping myself.

amelius•2h ago

Tesla autopilot has some disclaimers saying you should always be prepared to grab the wheel, and we all read the stories in the news ...

In other words, if you want AI to take over tasks of humans you either do it well or not at all.

bethekidyouwant•4h ago

If your daughter can climb out of the crib, then she is too big for the crib.

Also, if I accept your premise that a baby sleeping is inherently dangerous, then this is just an added layer of safety. It doesn’t remove safety.

But really safety is a highly lame way of framing this. what you want is more hours asleep so you have this thing try to hypnotize the baby with lights, sound, vibration, and it only alerts the parent(s) if it fails Eventually it could just straight up talk to your three year-old read it a second bedtime story, dispense a cup of water convince it not to hang out with the bad kids at school etc

alibova•4h ago

Love this!

A long time ago I built a cat detector to keep my cat out of the baby play area, this was before modern AI systems and I'm sure it could be so much better now. https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/baby-proofing-raspberry-pi...

amelius•4h ago

Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8

delichon•4h ago

A small pilot study for more efficient nanny state technology. Just add scale.

jerf•4h ago

The state is several steps ahead of you. Have you wondered why the push for AI all of a sudden, everywhere, all at once, really quite far ahead of its actual capabilities to help most of us? Huge monies thrown at it? An effectively-instantaneous turnaround on decades of anti-nuclear sentiment just to power AI?

It's not because it's going to be good for us.

mywacaday•3h ago

I remember when we were preparing to have our first kid 10 years ago we bought a monitor with the pad underthe mattress on the advice of other parents. As a former cpr instructor I was dumbfounded when I realised that parents would spend 100s on monitors but not one person had bothered to learn infant cpr.

OtherShrezzing•3h ago

Any reliable places online to learn? Or is it a course that you should only do in person?

coherentpony•3h ago

I did an in-person class. I highly recommend it.

sdoering•3h ago

I do not know about infant CPR. But I would never trust myself administering CPR to even an adult, after watching something online.

I have had regular first responder refresher courses at work every two years - and i have to say: I always relearned something every two years, because not having done it (luckily no-one needed my first aid) meant I had forgotten quite a bit in those two years.

Especially how it feels to administer CPR. and how to position the person.

So not sure where you are located, but in Germany, you can volunteer to become a first aid responder for your company - they love that, because from a certain size on they must have enough of us. And you get a certificate every time you retrain (you need to do this regularly every two years, as said).

We even once hat a baby puppet for training, but I was not able to test it that time (as it was not mandatory, I wanted that the parents actually had the chance - or those planning for kids).

wil421•3h ago

The hospital we had our kids at had a baby CPR class and an expectant parent class. The CPR class didn’t give you a certification but you learned what to do for CPR and choking.

yusina•3h ago

How reliable is this, i.e., what is the failure rate? False positives / negatives?

laurent_du•3h ago

As a parent of several kids, I have no idea what is the use case for this. When does it ever happen that a kid too small to be safe by himself has to be let alone, with a camera to record him? My eyes are a good enough camera, and my brain holds a reasonable list of safety rules. What problem does this solve that isn't already near perfectly solved by my existence?

jdminhbg•3h ago

> When does it ever happen that a kid too small to be safe by himself has to be let alone, with a camera to record him?

Nap time? Overnight?

sokoloff•2h ago

The same set of problems that is solved by an audio or AV baby monitor.

Surely you didn’t have the baby in the same room as an awake adult 24 hours per day for 730 straight days, right?

Edmond•2h ago

What about the AI playground monitor?:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44087499

I am the developer :)

That is a demo of course but I think what sets LLM tools like this apart from what came before is that implemented correctly, the user gets to decide what it is, and can change the meaning at any time, in other words what it should be looking for at any time.

That is of course if the solution is implementation correctly.

There is immense potential for these type of capabilities if they are done in a way that leaves the specific use case implementation up to users.

victorbjorklund•1h ago

You never ever sleep? Did your children have an awake adult watching them 24/7 all year around? I doubt most people can have that situation since that would require a team of people taking shifts sitting looking at the child

bigmattystyles•2h ago

I’m dumbfounded at the negative comments in here. Read the git read me, it’s a hobby for op, not some crazy commercial venture and he makes it clear it’s to help in the event one gets distracted for a few seconds. The only valid comment is his daughter being likely too big for her crib, but sheesh lay off op’s approach to actually trying something. Ps: am not op’s alt account.

Lottie is an open format for animated vector graphics

Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python (2018)

Writing a Self-Mutating x86_64 C Program (2013)

Lisping at JPL

Plwm – An X11 window manager written in Prolog

Design Pressure: The Invisible Hand That Shapes Your Code

Claude 4 System Card

Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science

Martin (YC S23) Is Hiring Founding AI/Product Engineers to Build a Better Siri

'Strange metals' point to a whole new way to understand electricity

Can a Corporation Be Pardoned?

Show HN: SVG Animation Software

Show HN: DaedalOS – Desktop Environment in the Browser

Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

Wrench Attacks: Physical attacks targeting cryptocurrency users (2024) [pdf]

The Newark airport crisis is about to become everyone's problem

Programming on 34 Keys (2022)

Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

Show HN: Wall Go – browser remake of a Devil's Plan 2 mini-game

Why top posting has won (2018)

Now you can watch the Internet Archive preserve documents in real time

Reinvent the Wheel

Drawing power out of CCS port

AI Hallucination Cases Database

Chomsky on What ChatGPT Is Good For

Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts in Their Novels

Why old games never die, but new ones do

How to Install Windows NT 4 Server on Proxmox

At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

Show HN: Open-source protein and ligand viewer