Built on Ring, for the people who never sleep
The night shift, handled.
Nightlight learns your household's nights from the Ring doorbell it already has, answers a 3am doorway with a recorded family voice, and wakes the caregiver only when the voice is not enough.
Ring Partner API · AWS · Open source (MIT)
One household, thirty nights
Every mark is one night. A standard door alarm would have woken this caregiver on each of the three nights something happened. Nightlight woke them once.
Measured, not promised: across 2,936 nights of 34 real homes from the public CASAS corpus, a standard door alarm wakes the caregiver 14,068 times. Nightlight: 774. A 94.5 percent reduction, on data we did not author. And what that restraint cost, on the same data: of 34 resident-labelled night-time exits, Nightlight flagged 7, and 26 of the 27 it did not flag were exits the resident returned from within thirty minutes. Method and full results
What it is
A night watchman made from the Ring doorbell a family already owns, for households caring for someone with dementia. Nothing to install, nothing to wear.
Why it exists
Six in ten people with dementia wander, and every door alarm answers the same way: it wakes the exhausted caregiver. That answer has been tested in a controlled trial, and it left caregivers' measured sleep unchanged. Seventy percent of families who move a relative into care cite the nights.
How it works
It learns your household's normal nights, answers a 3am doorway with a recorded family voice, and wakes you only if the voice is not enough. Escalation contacts are the last resort.
Tested on 2,936 nights of real homes. Not ours.
We replayed 34 real single-resident smart homes from the public CASAS corpus (Washington State University, CC-BY-4.0) through the exact engine this site runs, seeding each home's baseline on its first 28 days and judging every night after, once. The comparison column is the product families can buy today: a door alarm that fires on every night-time doorway event.
14,068
caregiver wakes from a threshold door alarm, disturbing 1,068 of the 2,936 nights
774
wakes from Nightlight on the same events: a 94.5 percent reduction, with 72 tracking resident-labeled real exits
365
doorway moments settled by the familiar-voice stage alone, with nobody woken at all
Every number, the per-home spread, the leakage-safe method, and the measured limits are in docs/EVAL.md, reproducible with one command against the public dataset.
The most dangerous door in America is the front door at 3am.
When someone with dementia leaves home at night and is not found within 24 hours, the outcomes are often fatal. Families are left with two bad options: lock the person in, or attach a tracker they will remove. Meanwhile the caregiver, the second patient in the house, stops sleeping. Every door alarm on the market responds the same way: it wakes them up. Nightlight exists to let them sleep.
60%
of people living with dementia wander, most dangerously at night
67%
of dementia caregivers suffer significant sleep disturbance
63%
fewer bedroom falls when care homes replaced night checks with ambient monitoring
70%
of caregivers who moved a relative into care cited the nights in that decision
Voice first. Caregiver second. Alarm never.
Four steps, each designed around one question: what is the gentlest thing that keeps this person safe right now?
Learn the household's normal
Nightlight builds an hour-by-hour picture of your home's front door: school runs, deliveries, evening comings and goings. For its first week it only watches.
Notice the 3am doorway
When the door sees human motion at an hour that is quiet for your household, Nightlight opens an incident. Cars, animals, and wind can never trigger anything.
Respond with a familiar voice first
A message your family recorded plays at the door. For a person with dementia, a trusted voice asking them to come back inside is often all it takes.
Wake the caregiver only if needed
If activity continues, the caregiver gets a gentle notification with a snapshot and a one-tap response. Backup contacts are alerted only if that goes unanswered.
A month of nights, in your browser, on the real engine.
This is the actual Nightlight engine running on a simulated household's month. Pick the night of September 23 to watch a 2:40am doorway moment settle without anyone being woken, and September 12 to see the one night the system rightly escalated.
204 events, one month, replayed through the real engine in your browser
29 of 30
nights the caregiver slept
18
night streak, and counting
3
doorway incidents, two settled by voice alone
One square per night. Choose one.
Night of 2026-09-23
- 02:40The front door camera reports human motion, far outside this household's normal pattern for the hour.
- 02:40Nightlight fetches a doorway snapshot and plays the family's recorded voice message at the door.
- 02:45Five quiet minutes follow. The moment settles on its own. Nobody is woken.
Built on Ring, and you can check that from here.
Nightlight runs on the Ring Partner API: OAuth against oauth.ring.com, devices and event history from api.amazonvision.com, and verified webhook intake for everything that happens at the door. The webhook is the part a family is really trusting, so it is the part you can press.
A signed Ring webhook, delivered live
Ring signs every webhook it sends with HMAC SHA-256 over the raw request body. Press this and Nightlight will sign three deliveries the way Ring does and post them to the same /webhooks/ring endpoint a real doorbell posts to. The first is genuine. The other two are the ones that matter.
Connecting your own Ring doorbell
Nothing to install and nothing to wear: the doorbell is already on the door. This is the whole connection, and where it stands today.
1Install Nightlight from the Ring Appstore
Needs Ring certificationA family finds Nightlight in the Ring Appstore and chooses to connect it. Ring owns this step, and it is the one that waits on certification. Nightlight is built for the elderly-care category the Appstore currently advertises with no apps in it.
2Ring sends a signed link request
Live endpointRing redirects the browser to Nightlight's registered Account Link URL with a nonce that cryptographically binds the link to one Ring account. Nightlight validates it before anything else happens. That check is the one you can press below.
GET /oauth/ring/link
3Nightlight exchanges Ring's code for tokens
Live endpointRing calls Nightlight's registered Token Exchange URL. Nightlight swaps the authorization code for an access token and a refresh token against oauth.ring.com, stores them, and refreshes them before they expire. A household never sees this step.
POST /oauth/ring/token
4The doorbell starts reporting, and Nightlight watches
Live endpointNightlight reads the household's devices and event history, then receives verified webhooks for everything that happens at the door. For the first seven nights it only watches, learning what normal looks like for this household before it will act on anything.
GET /api/ring/devices
Where this actually stands: steps two, three and four are deployed and answering now. Step one is Ring's: account linking begins in the Ring Appstore, so a household cannot connect a real doorbell until Nightlight is certified. That is why this page offers no sign-in button it could not honour.
The security step, checked rather than described
Step two is the one that matters. Ring binds each link request to one account with an HMAC over the account id and a timestamp. Get it wrong permissively and somebody attaches their doorbell to another family's household, which here means a stranger's camera feeding a dementia alerting system.
Ask Alexa how the night went.
The same household that answers the caregiver app answers an assistant, through a Model Context Protocol server on spec 2025-11-25 over Streamable HTTP. Five tools, read-only except for acknowledging an incident, so a caregiver can say “I have it” without finding their phone in the dark.
An assistant asking after the household
A caregiver should be able to ask how last night went without reaching for a phone. Nightlight answers that through the Model Context Protocol, which is how Alexa+ talks to tools. Press this and your browser will hold a complete session with the deployed server, the way an assistant would. Every row below is the server's own answer.
Everything above is one labelled demo household that everybody shares, and it needs no key. Take a key for a household nobody else can see: free, no account. Nothing about the key is stored, so keep it.
We did not invent the idea. We made it installable.
Ambient night monitoring is proven at scale in residential care, and familiar-voice redirection is established dementia practice. What has never existed is a version a family can have without installing sensors in every room. The doorbell was already on the door.
Alzheimer's Association
Wandering
Six in ten people living with dementia will wander at least once, and many do so repeatedly.
Mattos et al., Innovation in Aging, 2024
Sleep and caregiver burden: a scoping review
Up to 67 percent of dementia caregivers experience sleep disturbances, against up to 50 percent of the general population.
Pollak and Perlick, J Geriatr Psychiatry Neurol, 1991
Sleep problems and institutionalization of the elderly
Seventy percent of caregivers cited nocturnal problems in their decision to place a relative in care, often because their own sleep was disrupted.
Rowe et al., Alzheimer's & Dementia, 2009
A nighttime monitoring system reduced dangerous events
Detecting bed exits and waking the caregiver significantly reduced injuries and unattended home exits across 53 subjects over 12 months.
Rowe et al., Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 2010
The same system did not improve caregivers' sleep
In 49 caregivers followed for a year with actigraphy, sleep time, waking after sleep onset and sleep quality were unchanged, though caregivers called the system of great help. This is why Nightlight answers the door before it wakes anyone.
Care Home Professional, national report
94,000 night checks replaced
UK care homes replaced routine physical night checks with ambient monitoring, cutting bedroom falls by 63 percent and improving resident sleep by 50 percent.
Peer-reviewed validation study
Night-time monitoring in dementia households
A door-and-motion algorithm validated across 94 households over 365 nights confirmed 91.2 percent of night-time exit alerts as genuine.
Journal of Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies Engineering
Smart home night wandering intervention
Research systems already use prerecorded audio prompts to redirect people with dementia at night, waking the caregiver only when an exit door opens.
Gerontological Society of America pilot
Respite and caregiver outcomes
As little as three hours of weekly respite measurably reduces pre-death grief and improves neurocognitive function in family caregivers.
Dignity is the design constraint.
Nightlight stores
- Event timestamps and types from the doorbell
- The incident record: what happened, what the system did, how it ended
- The voice message your family recorded, until you delete it
- Caregiver and backup contact details you provide
Nightlight never stores
- Continuous video or any audio from the home
- The location of the person being cared for
- Facial or identity data of any kind: the Ring API offers none, and we want none
- Anything about your neighbors or visitors beyond event times
Nightlight is a home safety aid. It does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition, and it does not replace supervision or professional care advice. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.
For developers
The night-pattern engine is available as an API: send a stream of timestamped events and receive baseline, anomaly scores, and incident decisions with full explanations. Webhook intake is published separately as the open source package ring-webhook-kit: HMAC verification, typed events, and idempotent deduplication for any Ring Partner API project.
API=https://qdvxx267lgnsitq242aplz722a0zuien.lambda-url.us-east-1.on.aws curl $API/api/summary curl $API/api/morning-note curl $API/api/resilience
The deployed API on AWS Lambda, answering now. The household behind it is the simulated one on this page. To run the same engine on your own machine, follow the repository README.
About this build
- Ring track entry, Build Ship Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon
- AWS Builder and Open Source mini challenges
- Deterministic, unit-tested detection: 162 tests across engine, webhook intake, simulator, and the HTTP path
- Every demo runs the production engine; simulated data is always labeled
- A running friction log ships in the repository as feedback to the Ring team
The questions a careful family asks.
Does Nightlight record my parent?
No. Nightlight stores event times and types, the incident record, and the voice message your family recorded. It never stores continuous video, never audio from inside the home, and never anyone's identity. The doorway snapshot attached to a notification is fetched only when an incident is already open.
Why a voice instead of an alarm?
Alarms frighten and disorient a person with dementia, and they wake the whole house. Verbal redirection by a familiar, trusted voice is an established dementia care technique: calm, specific, and personal. Nightlight leads with the response most likely to work and least likely to harm.
How is this different from a 30 dollar door alarm?
A door alarm's entire product is waking you up, every time, for everything. Nightlight's product is the opposite: it learns what is normal for your household, responds at the door first, and counts its success in nights it never had to wake you.
What if my parent uses a back door?
Nightlight watches whichever Ring cameras the household already has and treats each as a doorway. Homes with one doorbell get protection at the main exit, which research shows is the most common night exit path. Additional cameras extend coverage.
What happens if the internet or camera goes down?
Device offline events are part of the data Nightlight watches. An offline camera during the night window is surfaced to the caregiver in the morning summary, and an extended outage during an open incident notifies immediately. Nightlight is a safety aid, not a guarantee, and we say so plainly.
Is this a medical device?
No. Nightlight is a home safety aid. It does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition, and it does not replace supervision or professional care advice. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.
Does it work without a Ring subscription?
Nightlight is built on the Ring Partner API's event, snapshot, and device capabilities. Exact plan requirements depend on Ring account features; the caregiver app tells you during setup exactly what your account supports.
Who is behind the demo data?
Nobody: it is a deterministic simulated month, clearly labeled, replayed through the same production engine, webhook verification, and effect pipeline that real Ring events use. The code is open source, so you can check.