I’m on a work placement at a small care home and the manager asked if I can build a bed-exit alert for three residents who are at risk of falls at night. Right now a night carer checks the rooms every hour, and two falls this year were found late.
Plan so far: a sensor under or on each bed sends bed_occupied to the home’s Hermetry org (they already use it for the boiler and fridges). If a resident is out of bed for more than 10 minutes between 22:00 and 06:00, the night staff get an alert. During the day nothing should happen, residents get up all the time.
Two things I’m stuck on:
1. Sensor. Options I’ve found: a pressure mat (FSR strip) under the mattress, load cells under the bed legs, or a PIR on the wall. No cameras, the manager was very clear. 2. The night-only part. I set up an alarm rule on the profile (bed_occupied == 0, duration debounce 600 s) and it works, but it also fires at 3 p.m. when someone is sitting in the lounge. I can’t see a time-of-day field on the alarm rule.
Also, how do the carers actually get it? They carry phones but they’re not Hermetry users yet.
For the sensor: an FSR strip under the mattress works but needs calibrating per mattress and drifts as the foam ages. Load cells under two legs are more reliable and don’t care about bedding. Avoid PIR, it can’t tell “in bed” from “standing next to the bed”.
Glad there’s no camera. Also check with the manager whether residents or families have to agree to the bed sensors, our building had to do paperwork for much less.
How do the night staff work, one person on a fixed station or walking around? That changes what kind of alert makes sense.
One carer at night, walking around, phone in pocket. There’s a PC at the nurse station but nobody sits at it at night.
Can’t the alarm rule just text the carer’s phone? Add the number as a recipient.
I don’t think alarm rules take phone numbers. When I set ours up, SMS only worked from a flow’s Notify block, where you can name a phone number.
Carlos is right about SMS. I run a food plant and we built nearly the same “only at night, only if it lasts” alert for cold room doors, so here’s what worked for us.
Alarm rules don’t have a time window, so do the logic in a Rules card instead. Put the three bed sensors under an asset for the wing (Sites & Assets), add a Rules card on a dashboard locked to that asset, and write:
When: A value changes, device = every device of the bed sensor profile, value bed_occupied, becomes 0, and stays so for 10 minutes. Only if: A time window, after 22:00, before 06:00 (a window can cross midnight). Then: Raise an alarm, type bed_exit, severity Major, on the device. Then Tell people.
With “every device of the profile”, each bed has its own trigger and its own 10-minute wait. The trigger fires once when the value turns 0, not on every message.
Two details. Make the sensors send bed_occupied as 1/0 every 30 seconds, not only on change. And the alarm you raise stays open until someone clears it (a Clear action, a flow or a person), so the carer clears it after checking the room, which also gives you a record.
For reaching the carer: Tell people goes to roles, and roles get the bell plus any linked chat app, not e-mail or SMS. If she uses a chat app on her phone, link it in her profile and that’s the quickest route. For a real SMS, add a flow with a Notify block and her number. The triggers page has the “stays so for” details.
Built it with load cells (two per bed, HX711, ESP32) and the Rules card. Test last night with my supervisor lying on a spare bed and getting up at 23:10: the alarm opened at 23:20 and the carer got it in the chat app.
One thing I got wrong first: I left my old alarm rule on the profile switched on, so the 3 p.m. lounge alarms kept coming. Deleted it, only the Rules card is left. And Rachel, the manager is getting written consent from the families before we put the other two in.
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