What a monitoring device actually shares, and who can see it.

Once you get past the cost, there's a second question that stops most families dead, and it's the right one to ask: if I put something in Mum's home, what does it actually see, and who ends up able to look at it? Nobody wants to swap their worry for a nagging sense that they've quietly put their parent under surveillance in the one place they should feel most themselves.

So here is the plain answer, with nothing dressed up. This page walks through exactly what a camera-free home monitor detects, what it never records, where that information goes, and who can and can't see it. If any of it sounds too good, ask us to prove it. We'd rather you were sure than sold.

What it senses, in plain terms

The starting point is that a Check On Mum sensor watches the home, not the person. It notices the kinds of things that tell you someone is safe and going about their day:

• Presence. Whether there's someone in the room, without knowing or caring who.
• Movement. Ordinary moving about, walking through, sitting down, getting up.
• A fall. A sudden drop followed by someone staying down, which it can tell apart from an ordinary movement.
• The shape of the day. The rough rhythm of normal, up in the morning, moving through the kitchen, settling in the evening, so that a day badly out of shape can be flagged.
• Breathing, at rest. While someone is still, it can sense that they're breathing steadily. It cannot tell you anything more personal than that.

That's the whole list. It's a small, blunt set of safety signals, chosen precisely because it's enough to know someone is OK and nowhere near enough to know what they're doing.

What it never records

This is the part that matters most, so it's worth being blunt. Check On Mum uses 60GHz radar sensing, and radar has no lens and no microphone. That isn't a setting we've switched off. It's a physical fact about the technology:

• No pictures. There is no camera and no image of your parent anywhere, ever, because nothing is capable of taking one.
• No video. There's no live feed to log into and no footage to store, leak or hand over.
• No audio. No microphone means no conversations, no TV in the background, nothing of what's said in the home.
• No identity. The sensor doesn't know your mum from the neighbour who pops in. It sees movement, not a person's face or name.

What's left after all that is a stream of simple events, closer to a diary line than a recording: "up at 7", "moved through the kitchen", "a fall detected in the hallway". That's the raw material the whole system runs on, and it's why a sensor is welcome in a bathroom or a bedroom where a camera would be unthinkable.

Where the information goes, and how it's kept

For an alert to reach your phone, the event has to travel somewhere, so let's be honest about that too. When the sensor flags something, that event is sent securely onward to deliver the alert and to keep a short history, which is what lets the system learn a normal routine and notice when a day is off. That data is encrypted on the way, it isn't sold, and it isn't handed to advertisers or data brokers.

And here's the quiet reassurance underneath all of it: because what's stored is a list of events rather than images or audio, there's simply no picture or recording of your parent to lose. The worst case for a camera system, footage of someone's private life getting out, isn't a worst case here, because that footage was never created. You can't leak what doesn't exist.

Who can see it, and who can't

Access is narrow and it's yours to set. The alerts go only to the phones you nominate, and that's usually a small circle: you, your siblings, a partner, or a trusted carer. You decide who's on the list, and you can change it whenever the situation changes. There's no public page, no shared feed a stranger could stumble onto, and no login for a nosy relative you didn't invite.

Just as important is who can't see it. There's no team of people somewhere watching a wall of homes, because there's nothing to watch, only events to pass along. We can't see a picture of your parent because none is made. And nobody outside your chosen circle gets a message. If you'd like the plain-English version of how a flag becomes an alert on the right phones, the full step by step is on our how it works page.

Monitoring, not surveillance

The word "monitoring" carries a lot of baggage, and families are right to be wary of it. So it's worth naming the line clearly. Surveillance is being able to watch a person, replay their day, and see who came and went. This does none of that, and it's built so it can't. It won't tell you who visited, what was said, or how your parent spent their afternoon. It's deliberately blind to their ordinary life, and awake only to the safety events it exists to catch.

That distinction is the whole point. A good monitor should make a parent feel less watched, not more, because it quietly removes the reason for the more intrusive things, the daily check-in calls that grate, the camera someone might otherwise have pushed for. It's on the side of them keeping their privacy and their independence, not chipping away at either.

Bringing your parent into it

Because it's their home, the conversation matters as much as the box on the wall. The good news is that the honest version of this is an easy thing to say: it's not a camera, nobody can watch you, it just lets the family know if something looks wrong so you can stay in your own place longer. A lot of people who would never accept a lens pointed at them are genuinely comfortable once they understand there's no image of them anywhere. Told plainly, it lands as what it is, a bit of quiet backup, and something on their side.

The honest limits

No monitoring is perfect, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. Check On Mum is a wellbeing and safety aid: a backup that makes sure the people who care find out when something looks wrong. No device detects every fall or every event, it doesn't provide clinical or medical monitoring, and it's no substitute for a GP's or an occupational therapist's judgement about living alone. What it does do is narrow and worth a lot: it lets a family stop guessing, without asking a parent to trade away their privacy to make it happen.