Hearth

Voice check-ins for the people we look after.

Hearth helps a family keep an eye on an older person who lives on their own, without calling every day and without the older person having to learn anything new. They just talk: "I took my morning pills." "I feel a bit lonely." "I fell." A voice assistant turns that into a few calm actions, and the family member sees a short, honest summary on their phone.

Built for the Alexa+ track of the Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon.

What is in the box

  Rose talks  ──►  voice assistant  ──MCP (Streamable HTTP)──►  Hearth MCP server  ──►  SQLite
 (living room)    (simulated here;                              /mcp   11 tools           │
                   Alexa+ in real life)                                                   │
                                                                                          ▼
                                            Priya's phone  ◄──── get_caregiver_summary ◄──┘

Related MCP server: Hearth v2

Run it

You need Python 3.10 or newer and an internet connection for the first start.

• Windows: double-click start.bat

• Mac / Linux: run ./start.sh

The first start sets itself up (about a minute). Your browser opens at http://127.0.0.1:8765/. Use Chrome for the microphone; any browser works if you type instead.

Prefer the command line?

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate     # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m hearth.server

Settings (all optional, environment variables): HEARTH_PORT (8765), HEARTH_TZ (Asia/Kolkata), HEARTH_EMERGENCY_NUMBER (shown in safety messages, for example 112 or 911), HEARTH_DB.

Try it

Use the Demo time menu (top right) to jump to 8:20 AM, then tap the lamp and say, or tap a phrase:

1. "Good morning" starts the daily check-in.

2. "I took my morning pills" makes two real tool calls and updates the phone.

3. "I took my vitamin D" is refused politely, because it is not time yet.

4. "I feel a bit lonely" is logged, and the assistant offers to tell Priya. Say "yes".

5. "Can I take two metformin?" is not answered. It points to a pharmacist or doctor and offers to tell Priya.

6. "I fell" alerts Priya at once and tells Rose to call the local emergency number.

Switch the demo time to 1:10 PM to see the morning doses shown as not confirmed on the phone.

The tools

Designed to be safe

Elder care is not a place to be clever, so a few rules are built in and covered by tests:

• No medical advice. Questions about doubling, skipping or forgetting a dose are never answered. The assistant points to a pharmacist or doctor and offers to tell the caregiver.

• "Not confirmed", never "missed". Hearth cannot know whether a pill was taken, only whether someone said so.

• It will not log a dose that is not due, so a mistaken "I took it" cannot hide a real gap.

• Emergencies come first. Falls, chest pain, trouble breathing, fainting and sudden confusion alert the caregiver immediately. Hearth always says it cannot call emergency services and tells the person to do so.

• Nothing is sent to the caregiver without the person's say-so, except emergencies.

Honest limitations

• The assistant in this repo is a simulator that uses simple language patterns, not a language model. It exists so the project runs anywhere, free, with predictable results. The MCP server does not depend on it. We have not tested against a real Alexa+ device or the Alexa+ Preview.

• It is a single-household demo with no login. Do not put real health data in it, and do not expose it to the internet as it is.

• The data you see is made-up demo data (a person named Rose and her daughter Priya).

• Dates and times use HEARTH_TZ. The Demo time menu fakes the clock for demos only.

• The page was checked by running its script against the live server in a simulated browser; it has not been checked visually on every device.

Tests

pip install pytest
python -m pytest -q

30 tests cover the care logic, and also start the real server and check, over real MCP, that the negotiated protocol version is 2025-11-25 or later (the SDK negotiates 2026-07-28), that tools list and run, and that the safety rules above hold.

Project layout

hearth/core.py        care logic and storage (no MCP code, easy to test)
hearth/server.py      MCP server (Streamable HTTP) + demo web routes
hearth/assistant.py   voice-assistant simulator; calls the server over MCP
hearth/static/        the demo page
tests/                unit and end-to-end tests

License

MIT. See LICENSE.