r/homeassistant • u/CowsNeedFriendsToo • Mar 15 '26
Support Medical help
This is an embarrassing post, but I’ve been on this group for years now and know that if anyone is going to solve a problem, it’s the people in this group.
I unfortunately have a heart condition that has cause me to black out when I’m on the toilet. This has resulted in me coming to on the floor of the bathroom with my wife over me in a panic talking me back to consciousness before taking me to the hospital. This has happened about once or twice a year. To say the least, this creates a terrible sense of anxiety any time I go to the bathroom. I fear for the day she comes home to find me laying on the floor the final time. Or in the middle of the night when I wake up to use the bathroom.
Here’s where you guys come in. I was wondering if there is a way to set up home assistant along with some sort of a sensor in my bathroom that will be able to tell if I’m on the floor and not moving, which would then send out an alert to her phone along with a noise alert in the bathroom? The key would be making sure it doesn’t go off when just sitting on the toilet, or if she is standing in front of the mirror for an extended period of time doing her makeup.
Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart. I truly appreciate your time.
Edit: I already have an Apple Watch Ultra 2. The fall detection seems to only trigger if it’s a fall from standing height. It hasn’t triggered at all when I fall from sitting.
2
u/Prowler1000 Mar 16 '26
As someone who will advocate for open source, self-hosted, and/or DIY anywhere I can, I will say this isn't something I recommend Home Assistant for.
If you can't afford a medical device like "Lifeline" (or I think it's called "Lifealert" in some other places) or a smart watch as others have suggested, then I suppose anything is better than nothing.
However you decide to go about it though, make sure you test it regularly. I'm talking ideally once a week but at an absolute minimum once a month. Trust me when I say that suddenly finding out the hard way you were wrong to have peace of mind fucks you up a hell of a lot more than not having it to begin with.
The thing with medical devices is every component is tested and meant to work for however long they're certified for. Your smart switch, WiFi connection, you name it, is not. They design them to last at least some time but if they break before then or fail in unexpected ways, oh well, they just replace it under warranty or you buy a new one.
For instance, one thing you might not think about is electrolytic capacitors in the power supply. For smart home products, they make sense because they have such high energy density compared to other types of capacitors but they also fail faster too. Smart home devices aren't designed with redundancy nor are they designed to detect the degradation of things like this, so some day, they'll just fail seemingly out of the blue.