Show HN: AI Baby Monitor – local Video-LLM that beeps when safety rules break
88 comments
·May 21, 2025bigmattystyles
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.
zeenolife
Cheers!
Yes, I tried to stress it hard that it's in no way a replacement for an adult, just an additional eye as a safeguard
throwaway314155
The only negative comment that is perhaps overly negative is the one mentioning "killing babies" (but they make a good point still).
Everyone else's criticism is effectively entirely warranted even if it's just a hobby project if only because the criticisms are mostly pretty mild and reasonable things like "don't try to automate parenting with tech that still isn't ready yet".
husband4412
Tools that can cause harm deserve scrutiny, regardless if OP make money or not.
Also who knows ? With enough popularity, OP might launch this into a startup.
diggan
> Tools that can cause harm deserve scrutiny
How on earth would this project, by itself, cause harm?
Sure, inattentive parents can lead to children hurting themselves, but that can happen while browsing gmail, or even when frigate is setup, does that mean gmail and frigate cause harm to children? Obviously not.
itishappy
Gmail and Frigate aren't AI Baby Monitors. If you use Frigate as a baby monitor, it's absolutely worth scrutinizing your setup. The exact same thing can be said of a human nanny too. You wouldn't hire someone with no research.
bilsbie
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.
Edmond
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.
ozzydave
I want this for pedestrians and cyclists at intersections, and particularly HAWK beacons.
csmoak
https://www.roundabout.tech/ tackles this problem
throwup238
There’s an entire Curb Your Enthusiasm season about that.
(Just get a fence is the conclusion)
bronco21016
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.
barbazoo
Except it’ll fail and a kid will die. Please keep physically blocking off pools.
pixl97
Eh, I don't think anyone is saying they are going to stop blocking off pools...
I had a friend that almost lost his kid with a pool with a self closing gate, an object happened to get caught in the latch when someone was leaving the pool and their 2 year old capitalized on this to almost get themselves killed. They had to perform CPR and rush to the hospital.
A backup system that could alert is just another layer of the security onion.
epolanski
Are we moving to a world where AI will be fed so much of our cameras for analysis?
alibova
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
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8
DonHopkins
That would work great to keep babies from peeing on things, too!
turtlebits
Sorry, this is an interesting but terrible idea.
If your crib is unsafe or undersized, the solution is to make it safe by adding guardrails or buying a safer/correct sized model. Or remove the hazard entirely by putting their bed on the floor.
Adding AI/tech to catch deficiencies is not the right way to go about it. You're willing to risk injury/death in case the AI is wrong, you don't hear the beep, or there are too many false positives and you end up ignoring it?
This is the same thing as self driving. It seems good enough to that it takes your attention away - until it doesn't. And it's AI, not a model specifically trained on catching the issue.
its-summertime
I usually replace all my fuses with plain wire, since I know not to plug broken things in in the first place.
Foreignborn
way too many people get hung up on the idea OP led with.
what OP has is a fully self hosted, private video feed that can alert for more sophisticated events like:
- is anything happening that shouldn’t be? - are things not where they’re supposed to be? - has anything fallen? (plants, things into the pool)
good job OP. i’m going to take a look at this in the next couple months.
th3h4mm3r
What about hardware?
dtgriscom
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
Totally doable! Raspberry pi and YOLO.
throwaway173738
Especially doable since the owner can probably get lots of pictures of their cat in different poses and lighting conditions and really overfit on their cat instead of just any cat.
zeenolife
the gemma 3n looks promising.
Btw, it doesn't really sound like the problem needs a video as an input to llm. Feels like sending an image is okay. So that makes it less demanding(?)
yusina
How reliable is this, i.e., what is the failure rate? False positives / negatives?
zeenolife
It's a bit tricky, the fp rate is not ideal, it does wrongly beep from time to time. I haven't really had a serious false negative, but did have some true positives :)
About the hard numbers, it's tough to test it quantitatively, because there's not a lot of data for babies in danger :D and I hope it stays that way
In general, I'm hoping that the open models will get better, there has been a lot of acceleration in video modality recently
pabe
What a cool project with local processing! Will check it out, thanks!
jxcole
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
Yeah it's an interesting project but it seems there should be lower stakes use cases that should be tried first.
NitpickLawyer
> 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
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...
arcticfox
I looked for primary sources on two randomly selected ones there, the VTech Baby Monitor Battery Defect Settlement and the Motorola Baby and I didn't find anything. Only the linked site. I feel like GPT just invented those lawsuits.
Just checked Infant Optics Monitor Class Action and also didn't find anything.
epolanski
He's not selling a product, he's sharing a library which includes his terms and conditions.
barbazoo
> When we bought a crib for our daughter, the first thing she tried was climbing over the rail
Maybe get a proper crib then?!
3abiton
This is such a fun project! I am curious about the hardware used? Or is the LLM hosted on a remote server?
zeenolife
Hey! It's fully local, I was trying to build it privacy first. All the things related to kids are very sensitive, I didn't want to send anything to cloud.
But you can still run the inference remotely, changing that should be just a matter of changing the address.
asachanfbd
This sounds interesting, I would give it a try coming weekend.
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