Show HN: AI Baby Monitor – local Video-LLM that beeps when safety rules break
32 comments
·May 21, 2025bethekidyouwant
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
mywacaday
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
Any reliable places online to learn? Or is it a course that you should only do in person?
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.
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.
throwup238
There’s an entire Curb Your Enthusiasm season about that.
(Just get a fence is the conclusion)
ozzydave
I want this for pedestrians and cyclists at intersections, and particularly HAWK beacons.
csmoak
https://www.roundabout.tech/ tackles this problem
yusina
How reliable is this, i.e., what is the failure rate? False positives / negatives?
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
delichon
A small pilot study for more efficient nanny state technology. Just add scale.
jerf
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.
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.
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.
worldsayshi
Yeah it's an interesting project but it seems there should be lower stakes use cases that should be tried first.
amelius
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
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_
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
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.
th3h4mm3r
What about hardware?
temporarything
Great idea! Is it possible to run this on latest Macbook Pros? No GPU unfortunately :)
dghlsakjg
The latest MacBook pros all have gpu cores built in.
clarkcharlie03
Pretty cool - I might try this with my kiddo
rokset3
will it be able to process sounds, so it can beep while baby crying? i work with music in headphones, would be nice
techjamie
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.
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