Daily insights and reports: understanding a parent’s routine, and who else can see it

What movement can tell you

Motion and door sensors do not know what someone is doing, but over days and weeks the times and places of movement say a lot. Is Dad getting up later than he used to? Is Mum going to the bathroom more at night? Has she stopped going out in the mornings? Changes like these are often worth a conversation, or a word with a doctor, long before anything goes wrong.

Every figure below is worked out the same way in the app, the reports and the assistant, so the numbers agree wherever you see them.

The Insights tab, chart by chart

Insights opens with tiles for the day, each next to its usual value: Today so far, Last activity, First activity, Night events, Bathroom visits, Time out, Door openings and Active hours. Below them, What stands out lists anything notable in plain words. Then the charts:

• Activity per day: sensor events per day, stacked by room, with a dashed line for an average day. Tap a day to see its numbers.
• Hour by hour: one day against a usual day, so a slow morning or a restless night stands out.
• Where movement was seen: a timeline of the day by room, with door openings and time out. Time out that started at night is striped, because it may be sleep in a room without a sensor.
• Time per room: estimated from the time between motion events.
• Activity heatmap: events per hour, one row per day. Routines, and changes to them, are easy to spot here.

Today compared with a usual day

“Usual” is the average of the other days in the period you are viewing. Comparisons only start from the first day with data, so a new home is not compared with zeros. Give a new installation a week or two before reading much into the comparisons. The reports go further and only compare days since every sensor in use was installed, so adding a bathroom sensor does not look like a sudden rise in bathroom visits.

Daily and weekly reports

Every monitored home gets a daily report at 8am home time about the day before, and a weekly report on Mondays about the last seven days. They go to the people who look after the home: on Telegram as a chart with a short summary if you have linked @BirdhouseHomeBot, otherwise by email with the chart attached. On a normal day the report is short and says so. When something differed from usual, it says what.

“How did Mum sleep?” Asking the assistant

The Birdhouse assistant is in the app (Ask about Mum) and on Telegram. Ask in your own words. It answers from the sensors in the homes you can see, can draw a chart sized for a phone screen, and can compare today with the usual.

Sleep is a good example of what it can and cannot do. Birdhouse has no sleep sensor. What it can see is when movement stopped in the evening, when it started again in the morning, how many events there were between 10pm and 6am, and whether there were bathroom visits during the night, all compared with your parent’s usual nights. An answer might sound like this:

Every conversation carries the same reminder: answers come from sensors and can miss things. In an emergency, call 995.

Your data and the assistant

Before the assistant answers for the first time, it shows a notice and asks you to agree. To answer, it sends your question and the home information it needs (activity, sensors, alerts and the names you use) to OpenAI, an AI provider in the United States. Under OpenAI’s API terms, that data is not used to train its models and is deleted within 30 days. Birdhouse keeps your conversation until you start over or delete your account. You can turn the assistant off at any time in Settings › Your data, and everything else in Birdhouse keeps working without it. The assistant only uses homes you can see yourself.

Who else can see a home

• The people you invite, with the role and detail level you choose. A Summary viewer sees alerts and whether someone is home, but no activity times.
• A care agency you invite, and only after it accepts. You can remove it at any time.
• Birdhouse staff can always see whether the hub and sensors work (online, battery, signal), so we can support you. In a family’s home they see activity only while you have a Birdhouse monitoring plan, or while you have given support access for 1 to 30 days (7 by default). You can end it early.
• Every time Birdhouse support looks at activity, a line is added to the home’s Who looked log, which the owner can read in the app.

If an alert surprises you, Ask Birdhouse to look into this on the alert gives support access for 7 days and sends us your note, and we reply by email. You can download your data or delete your account under Settings › Your data. The full details are in our privacy policy.