My mother is old and her mental capabilities are declining. She loves music but she can no longer control devices.
I built her a "smart" speaker that recognizing her movement in the kitchen and start to play her favourite music. She loves it.
I also added e-mail reception capabilities so I can send her audio attachments in email and she can receive messages, advises, memos or to-dos from the family members to cheer her up, maintain some mental activity.
The messages are repeated for a certain time range and it seems that she understands and responds to them.
The thing also good for track her activity, or just remotely monitor what is going in her kitchen.
I share this small project hence it can help for other lonely elderly people.
You need a RaspberryPI and some software:
Motion - when motion is detected it executes a custom shell script
Fetchmail - Periodically checking her mails
Ripmime - Extracting the voice file from the mail
Mplayer - playing the voice fil
############################################################ # External Commands, Warnings and Logging: # You can use conversion specifiers for the on_xxxx commands # %Y = year, %m = month, %d = date, # %H = hour, %M = minute, %S = second, # %v = event, %q = frame number, %t = camera id number, # %D = changed pixels, %N = noise level, # %i and %J = width and height of motion area, # %K and %L = X and Y coordinates of motion center # %C = value defined by text_event # %f = filename with full path # %n = number indicating filetype # Both %f and %n are only defined for on_picture_save, # on_movie_start and on_movie_end # Quotation marks round string are allowed. ############################################################
# Do not sound beeps when detecting motion (default: on) # Note: Motion never beeps when running in daemon mode. quiet on
# Command to be executed when an event starts. (default: none) # An event starts at first motion detected after a period of no motion defined by event_gap on_event_start /home/pi/play