How a sensor in each room turns movement and breathing into a call to the right person, followed by one family's night with Aangan.
The sensor never sees anyone. It calls out, listens to its own echo, and notices when the echo comes back a hair early or a hair late.
1It calls out
A low-power radio pulse, a hundred million times a second. No camera, no microphone, and nothing recorded that looks or sounds like a person.
2It listens for the echo
The pulse bounces off a body and comes back. The sensor knows how far away that body is to within a few centimetres, even through a blanket or a shower curtain.
3The echo wobbles
A rising chest moves the surface by millimetres, and a heartbeat by a fraction of one. That wobble in the returning echo is the breathing, and inside it, the pulse.
Everything else Aangan does is built on that wobble.
01 / 06
Each room gets one radar sensor, mounted high on the wall. It has no camera or microphone, and nobody in the house has to wear or charge anything.
02 / 06
It sends out low-power radio waves that reflect off everything in the room. The reflections record movement and distance, and cannot form an image.
03 / 06
The reflections are sorted into individual people, so it knows who is where and whether each of them is sitting, walking or lying down, even with four people in one room.
04 / 06
When someone is still, the faint rise and fall of their chest reveals their breathing and heart rate. While they are moving, it holds off rather than guess.
05 / 06
Over days and weeks it builds a picture of what is normal for each person, so even a small change stands out against their own baseline.
06 / 06
A fall goes to family or a caregiver at once. Smaller changes become a note in the app or a line in the morning summary.
Follow one family from dinner to breakfast: what Aangan picks up during the night, and who it tells.
21:04
Papa is reading in his armchair, Rohan is on a call in the kitchen, Isha is dancing with her earphones in, and Ma has gone to lie down. Aangan can tell the four of them apart and knows which room each one is in, without a camera.
22:40
Ma has fallen asleep. Aangan reads her breathing from the small movements of her chest, in the dark, and compares it with her own usual range.
12breaths a minute
23:52
Her breathing has stayed near 18 breaths a minute for twenty minutes, which is high for her. It is not an emergency, so nobody is woken up. Rohan gets a note in the app, and it goes into the morning summary.
Aangan 23:52
Ma's breathing has been above her usual range for 20 minutes. Nothing to do right now.
Early change: a note to the family
02:12
Papa gets up at 02:10 for a glass of water. Two minutes later he is on the floor by his armchair and has not got back up. Aangan calls Rohan straight away and messages his sister Meera in London. If nobody picks up, it rings the caregiver next.
Urgent: a call, then the next person on the list
07:30
Rohan reads it over chai, and Meera reads it in London when she wakes up. It covers how everyone slept, what changed overnight, and what was done about it.
Aangan 07:30
Papa fell at 02:12. Rohan was with him by 02:16, and he was back in bed by 02:30. Ma was restless before midnight and settled by 00:30.
Everyday: a morning summary for the family, wherever they live
An illustrative night with an illustrative family. Alert channels are planned. The breathing trace is a real radar recording (Schellenberger et al., 2020, CC BY 4.0).
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