Been meaning to write this up for a while. My mom is at the age where a fall is my biggest worry, and I didn’t want a camera in her room. Ended up ceiling-mounting an FP2 in fall detection mode and running the alerts through Home Assistant so my phone gets a Telegram message and the HomePod in my office literally announces it out loud. Works great, took about an afternoon. Here’s everything I learned, including the stuff I got wrong.
First thing to know: fall detection is its own mode. The FP2 does presence/zones on a wall OR fall detection on a ceiling, not both. I already had one doing presence so this meant buying a second unit. Annoying but that’s how it is.
Mounting: flat on the ceiling, pointing straight down. Aqara says roughly 2.5-3m ceiling height (mine’s right around 9 ft). Coverage is basically a circle under the sensor, so put it over the spot that matters. I centered mine between her bed and the bathroom door since that’s the path she walks most at night. One mistake I almost made - I originally wanted it near the ceiling fan. Don’t. Anything moving in the detection cone (fan blades, hanging plants, curtains near a vent) will drive you crazy with false triggers.
In the Aqara app you add it like any FP2, then flip the working mode to Fall Detection. It walks you through calibration - you tell it the mounting height and map out the edges of the area. Don’t rush this part. Also set the “fall confirmation time”, which is how long someone has to stay down before it counts as a fall. I went with 30 seconds. Long enough that her kneeling to grab something under the bed doesn’t page me, short enough that it still matters in a real emergency.
Then TEST it. I actually laid down on her floor in like 5 different spots to make sure it fired every time, then sat down, knelt, bent over etc to make sure those didn’t. Felt ridiculous doing it but glad I did because the first calibration missed a corner of the room and I had to redo it.
On the HA side (I run HA in Docker on a Pi 4), once the fall triggers you’ll get a fall status entity you can automate on. Trigger a test fall and check Developer Tools > States to find the exact entity ID and what state it reports - depends on your integration path so I won’t pretend mine matches yours.
Telegram side, if you’ve never made a bot: message @BotFather in Telegram, /newbot, follow the prompts, save the token. Then message your bot once (it can’t message you first) and grab your chat ID from @userinfobot. In configuration.yaml:
telegram_bot:
- platform: polling
api_key: !secret telegram_bot_token
allowed_chat_ids:
- !secret telegram_chat_id
notify:
- platform: telegram
name: telegram_eddie
chat_id: !secret telegram_chat_id
Restart, test it from Developer Tools > Actions.
For the HomePod - they show up in HA as AirPlay media players through the Apple TV integration. Pair that with any TTS engine (I use local Piper, no cloud sub needed) and the HomePod will speak whatever you want.
The automation:
alias: "FP2 Fall Detected - Mom's Room"
mode: single
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.moms_room_fall_detection
to: "on"
for: "00:00:05"
actions:
- action: notify.telegram_eddie
data:
title: "FALL DETECTED"
message: >
Possible fall detected in Mom's room at
{{ now().strftime('%I:%M %p') }}. Check on her immediately.
- action: tts.speak
target:
entity_id: tts.piper
data:
media_player_entity_id: media_player.office_speaker
message: "Attention. A possible fall has been detected in Mom's room."
- delay: "00:00:20"
- action: tts.speak
target:
entity_id: tts.piper
data:
media_player_entity_id: media_player.office_speaker
message: "Repeating. A possible fall has been detected in Mom's room."
The 5 second “for:” is just to filter momentary blips, and I repeat the announcement once in case I’m not in the office the first time. Next version I want it to keep repeating until I acknowledge with an input_boolean but haven’t gotten around to it.
Random notes after a few months running this:
Redo the calibration if you move furniture around. Learned that one the hard way after we swapped her dresser to the other wall.
I test it about once a month by lying on the floor. My wife thinks I’m nuts.
I tuned everything to prefer false positives. An occasional pointless Telegram ping costs me nothing. Missing a real fall is not an option.
And obviously this doesn’t replace her medical alert pendant or me calling her every day, it’s a backup layer. But knowing the house itself is watching that room has been a huge weight off my mind.
Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to set this up.
It’s very interesting, informative and well written. You should be proud!