Night alerts for care homes, without a camera in the room.

A small unit in a wall socket by the bed tells the night shift when someone gets out of bed, leaves the room, or has not moved for a set time. We are a student team in Berlin, building it now. Our first parts are on order.

Talk to us about a pilot How it works

Scroll to follow one night shift.

At night, one person is responsible for about 52 residents.

51.6 on average, from a survey of 276 night workers in German care homes (Witten/Herdecke University, 2015).

About one incident every shift.

From the same survey. On average, in every other shift some residents could not be cared for.

03:12. Someone in room 14 gets out of bed.

The unit by the bed sees the WiFi signal change, and its radar notices movement where someone was lying still. It sends a bed exit alert.

The alert goes where staff already look.

In a care home that will be the nurse call, connected the way a sensor mat is. In a Pflege-WG, a shared flat for people who need care, it will be a phone or a chime.

What goes in the room

One small unit per room, plugged into a wall socket by the bed. Inside are a WiFi chip and a 24 GHz radar.

The WiFi chip receives packets from the home's WiFi router many times a second and measures how each one crossed the room. This is called channel state information (CSI). When someone moves, those numbers change.

The radar notices a person who is sitting or lying still, which WiFi alone handles badly.

There is no camera and no microphone in the unit. It cannot record images or sound.

Our first prototype, ordered this week, splits this across two ESP32-S3 boards on either side of the bed and a separate radar, so we can test the signal before we build the box.

Simulated signal: one column per WiFi subcarrier, newest reading at the top. We will replace it with recordings from our prototype once it is running.

What it tells the night shift

Bed exit
A resident has got out of bed.
Room exit
A resident has left the room.
No movement
Nobody in the room has moved for a set number of minutes.

It does not detect falls and it measures nothing about a person's health. It tells staff when to go and check on someone.

Where we are, October 2026

  1. We ordered the parts for our first prototype: ESP32-S3 WiFi boards and LD2410C radar modules. The firmware that sends and reads the WiFi measurements is written and waiting for them.

  2. Ten interviews start: three with Pflegedienste (home care services) that care for residents in Pflege-WGs, the rest mostly with care homes.

  3. Two pilot agreements, or we change direction. Pilots will use certified sensors with our alert software until our own unit is ready.

Where we start

We start with Berlin's Pflege-WGs, of which there were 811 at the end of 2025. At night one helper covers 3 to 12 residents, and Berlin's building rule that requires a nurse call system is written for care homes, not for these flats. Care homes are the larger market, and connecting to their nurse call comes next.

How we plan to charge

One price per unit, no subscription. The § 8(8) SGB XI grant pays up to 40% of the cost of digital equipment, up to €12,000 per care home or Pflegedienst. It covers purchases and leasing, not ongoing service fees.

Who else does this

Several companies already sell camera-free sensors to care homes, among them nevisQ, cogvis and Qumea. We want to cost less and fit the way German care homes and Pflege-WGs work. The interviews will tell us whether that is enough.

Cornelis Drebbel, 1572 to 1633

A Dutch inventor who worked in London. He built a mercury thermostat that kept a chicken incubator at a steady temperature, one of the first recorded self-regulating machines. In 1620 he built the first navigable submarine and tested it under the Thames. Two larger ones followed by 1624.

We took his name because of the thermostat. The porthole in our logo is for the submarine.

Team

Three students at CODE University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.

  • Portrait of Maryan Prydatko

    Maryan Prydatko

    Builds the sensor firmware and the alert software, and writes our YC application with Tobias. Also builds Hivemind at Aether, an app with more than 72,000 installs and 11,000 monthly active users.

  • Portrait of Tobias Burger

    Tobias Burger

    Runs interviews with care providers and writes our YC application with Maryan. Works part-time in revenue operations at Superchat and leads partnerships at START Berlin.

  • Portrait of Yannick Verheugen

    Yannick Verheugen

    Runs interviews and our CRM, and talks to CODE about EXIST funding. Student assistant in software development at Charité's Clinical Neurotechnology Lab. Before that, a year as a working student at Amazon and a banking apprenticeship.

Do you run a care home or a Pflegedienst in Berlin?

We are looking for two care homes or Pflegedienste to run a pilot with us this winter.

Write to hello@drebbellabs.com