The platform underneath
The protocols, the architecture, and the channels we use to keep an overnight watch quiet, local, and reliable.
Mesh and wireless protocols
No single radio covers every room of every house. We design each installation with protocol diversity in mind — if one mesh has interference, another carries the alert.
Zigbee
Low-power mesh for door, motion, and contact sensors.
Z-Wave (including Long Range)
Reliable through cinder block and lath-and-plaster walls. Long Range gives star-topology coverage out to detached buildings.
Bluetooth Low Energy
Room-level presence and short-range device control.
Wi-Fi (2.4, 5, and 6E)
For cameras and high-bandwidth devices. We segment carefully where the home network allows.
Matter
The emerging cross-vendor standard. We adopt as devices mature.
Thread
Low-power IPv6 mesh, complementary to Zigbee.
Wired infrastructure
Where it counts, we run cable. Wired beats wireless on reliability, latency, and power — and a wired sensor never needs a battery changed at 2 AM.
Power over Ethernet (PoE+)
Single-cable power and data for cameras and sensor hubs.
Ethernet
Gigabit backbone for the on-premises compute cluster.
USB
For local peripherals and edge accelerators.
Messaging and alerting
An alert that doesn't reach the right person at the right moment is worse than no alert at all. We run multiple channels in parallel and fall through to the next when one is unavailable.
Telegram (primary)
Fast, reliable, group-aware. Our default channel for most families.
Pushover (legacy backup)
Kept active for households that already trust it.
Home Assistant Companion push
Native iOS and Android push notifications with critical-alert priority.
Chromecast and Nest Hub voice TTS
Spoken alerts on the smart displays already in the house — useful for caregivers who don't carry a phone room-to-room.
MQTT (internal)
The pub/sub fabric that ties our internal services together.
SMS (coming soon)
A2P 10DLC and Toll-Free routes both in carrier review.
WhatsApp (coming soon)
Currently sandbox-only; production approval in progress.
Local-first architecture
This is the part we care about most. Video, audio, and sensor data stay on the home network. Inference runs on hardware physically located in the house. Only event-level alerts — a short text summary, not the underlying media — leave the property, and only over channels the family has explicitly opted into.
The practical implication: a Ruby House Alerts installation will keep working through an internet outage. The local node detects, decides, and stores. When connectivity returns, queued summaries flush to the family. Nothing about the safety loop depends on a cloud service we don't control.
Edge AI inference
All real-time perception — object detection, pose estimation, presence classification — runs on edge AI accelerators inside the home. The latency budget for a meaningful overnight alert is short, and round-tripping frames to a remote data center burns that budget on network hops. Doing inference locally is also the only way to honor the local-first commitment above.
Hybrid cloud fallback
For the narrow set of alerts that must reach the family even if the home internet has been down for hours, we maintain a thin cloud fallback: an out-of-band cellular link on the alerting node and a minimal cloud relay that knows nothing about the household except who to text when the local node goes quiet for too long. The fallback is an integrity check on the system itself, not a substitute for local detection.
Coming soon
What's actively in progress. We list it here both for transparency and because families ask.
SMS messaging
In carrier review. A2P 10DLC and Toll-Free both pending.
WhatsApp Business
In carrier review. Currently sandbox-only.
Voice calling (away-mode)
Optional automatic phone calls during caregiver travel. Off by default; activated only when families flag that they will be unavailable for an extended period. Designed for the case where Do Not Disturb would otherwise silence a text alert.
Apple HomeKit bridge
For households that already standardize on HomeKit.
Matter / Thread native support
As the device ecosystem matures.
Voice commands via Alexa and Google Home
Caregiver-facing controls, not resident-facing.
Mobile companion app
A focused native app to complement the web Family Portal.
Multi-language alerting
Spanish, Mandarin, and Hebrew first, with more to follow based on family demand.