BabyWatch | Devpost

Baby Alert

Inspiration

We know that new parents tend to struggle to look after their babies effectively, so we designed BabyWatch to help them. With its text alerts, parents will know when their baby wakes up at night.

What it does

BabyWatch uses a passive infrared (PIR) sensor to detect a baby's movement. If it picks up movement above a certain threshold (i.e., the amount you'd expect a sleeping baby to move), it sends a Telegram message to the parent that the baby is awake. Then, the parent can come and check in on the baby.

How we built it

Our device uses the ESP 32 Dev Module, which can connect to Wi-Fi. We wanted to send text alerts over Wi-Fi, so we used Telegram to do this. Specifically, we used Telegram in combination with IFTTT's response feature so an alert can be sent out over a certain motion threshold. The PIR sensor detects motion, and the code logic determines exactly when the alert should be sent.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges all involved unreliable hardware. For example, we struggled to upload some of our code to the ESP, partly because the device was not recognized by the computer. In response to these challenges, we improved our product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully integrated a motion detector with a text alert system using a Wi-Fi module. Although some of us were beginners, we quickly got used to the technologies we needed.