My wife is deaf and cannot hear when our newborn is crying at night. I'm desperately trying to find a way that will alert her. Here is my idea. Would it work?
Idea: Use a inexpensive Blink camera to pick up the sound of the baby crying and create a rule to turn on a smart plug to power a 110v vibrator that will be attached to our bed.
You could use a smart watch and an alert with pushover using the urgent mode and creating more vibration time I guess. The camera could be anyone that supports sound alerts and IFTTT, probably don't even need Hubitat for that.
I'm just brainstorming here, but I wonder if a decent vibration sensor would be able to "feel" the vibration of a standard baby monitor if it was duct taped right in front of the speaker? Or maybe there is a fancier baby monitor with a tactile alert feature.
I'd get in touch with @iharyadi, this is right up his alley if he has the time. He's the kinda guy that could help set up a turnkey box for you with what he's done to date, monitoring more than just sound in the room, ...and you'd be able to skip the Blink. He's set up on Ebay; an easy transaction.
I'd also find another sensory method to wake her than the 110V device attached to the bed. An annoying light and small fan perhaps. This will put her in a much calmer demeanor going in to tend to the little one than being awakened out-of-the-blue by the bed.... BUUUZZZZZZZZZZing.
P.S. By the way, it's more advice that you asked for but, ...she'll appreciate having at least Friday/Saturday nights off on that wake-up-call. There are ways. Believe me, it's the kind of thing that comes up YEARS later.
I have lots of lighting automations with LEDs that wake me up without sound. In a dark room, leds placed anywhere that are triggered will wake you up. Mine alert me by turning red and 100%. Will wake me out of a dead sleep without blinding me or setting off audio alerts.
I've never used @ogiewon's Hubduino software, but this looks like a good option. If this is your fist go-round with a baby, you'll eventually get to the stage where they can sleep through the night, but still have some fussy periods when the cant find their pacifier, etc. For those of us that can hear, you learn to "screen out" those little whimpers and whines. It's not until they get into a full blown cry that you probably need to get out of bed. Using something like an arduino, you could use the onboard microcontroller to "filter" microphone input. The downside: this could take some time and it sounds like you need sleep right now. The up side: Something like this could give you the best long-term results.
Hopefully ogiewon can weigh in. If you're interested in this and he doesn't reply, I'd post something over in the hubduino thread.
I saw the below post earlier today and was reminded of this discussion. Seems like a solution for the "detection" half of your situation. Uses the hubduino project mentioned earlier.