- Access to your loved one’s water heater
- Your loved one must have WiFi at their house
- An iPhone to download our app from the app store, and install the sensor (we will have an Android app available soon!)
- Someone to do the simple installation via an iPhone on site. See more on having another family member or helper do the installation.

Senior citizens use hot water more than you think! We’ve tested our sensors in senior citizens’ houses and found that the average senior citizen uses water about six to ten times a day, making it an excellent proxy for human behavior. CarePenguin can sense anything from rinsing a dish, brushing teeth, washing hands, doing dishes, doing laundry, taking a shower, etc. This is because hot water and cold water are usually mixed at the faucet. It’s rare that people just use cold water. When a faucet is turned on, some warm/hot water is moving through and even the smallest amount causes CarePenguin to detect an event of water use. Contact us if you have any questions!

The CarePenguin sensor simply takes the temperature of the hot water pipe output on a water heater. Whenever someone uses water in the house, the temperature of that pipe spikes up, indicating that someone in the house is up and active. The CarePenguin app displays this data, showing your loved one’s activity throughout the day. You can check anytime to see the last time your loved one was active and receive alerts if we detect a lack of activity, encouraging you to check in and make sure everything is okay.

Absolutely! CarePenguin is simple to install. All you need to do is zip-tie our sensor to the hot water pipe output on a water heater, plug it into a nearby outlet, set up your account on our app, and connect it to WiFi using our step-by-step instructions. If you can set up a Nest product or Amazon Alexa, you can set up CarePenguin.