Zoey Baby can read live sensor values out of your own Home Assistant instance. A smart sock gives heart rate, oxygen and sleep state. Readings show on the Home screen, and with sleep tracking on, the sensor’s history is rolled up into daily awake, asleep and deep totals, with naps drawn on the timeline that nobody had to log.
Your phone talks to your Home Assistant directly. Nothing routes through a gxlabs server, and the credentials stay on your devices.
What you need
1. A Home Assistant instance
If you don’t run one yet, start with the Home Assistant installation guide. Zoey Baby needs no add-on and no custom component of its own, just an instance you can sign in to.
2. Your smart sock, set up in Home Assistant
Zoey Baby reads entities, it doesn’t talk to the devices. Getting your sock into Home Assistant is a Home Assistant job: an official integration, a community integration, or an add-on, whichever one covers your hardware. Once the device’s entities report a value in Home Assistant, Zoey Baby can read it.
The app only lists sensor. and binary_sensor. entities.
3. A URL that works away from the house
On your home wifi a local address is fine, and the app will take one:
http://homeassistant.local:8123 connects and reads sensors like any
other. It stops the moment you leave, because that address only
resolves on your own network, and the readings stop with it.
So if you want vitals and naps while you are out, which is most of the
point, give the app an address that reaches your instance from
anywhere. In practice that means an https:// one:
- Home Assistant Cloud hands you a
https://….ui.nabu.casaaddress with nothing to configure. - Or set up remote access yourself, with your own domain and certificate.
Either one works at home too, so it goes in the app once and you can forget about it.
4. A long-lived access token
In Home Assistant, open your user profile, go to the Security tab, and create a long-lived access token at the bottom of the page. Copy it while it’s on screen, because Home Assistant won’t show it again. The authentication docs walk through it, or go straight to your profile’s Security tab.
The token is what the app authenticates with. Deleting it in Home Assistant is how you revoke the app’s access.
Zoey Baby keeps the token in the iOS keychain rather than in ordinary settings, and an exported backup carries it encrypted: the ZIP holds the URL and the token sealed under a key in your iCloud keychain, so they open on your own devices and read as blank on anyone else’s. Your entity names go in as plain text, since they name sensors rather than secrets.
Setting it up in the app
- Open Settings, then Sensors.
- Turn Enabled on.
- Paste your URL and your long-lived access token.
- Tap Connect. The app checks the token, then loads your entities.
- Pick the entity behind each reading.
| Slot | Entity | What it reads |
|---|---|---|
| Heart rate | sensor |
a number, in bpm |
| Oxygen | sensor |
a number, in % |
| Sleep state | sensor |
text: awake, light_sleep, deep_sleep |
| Charging | binary_sensor |
on or off, so time on the base doesn’t read as the sensor dropping out |
| Battery % | sensor |
a number, 0 to 100 |
Fill in only the slots you have a sensor for.
Sensor settings live on the family record, so a partner who joined your iCloud share picks up the same URL, token and entity choices without typing any of it again.
Automatic nap creation
Pick a sleep sensor and an Automatic nap creation section appears under Sensors. Switch it on and the app pulls the sensor’s history and keeps it up to date:
- Each day gets awake, asleep and deep totals.
- Each stretch of sleep becomes a nap on the Home timeline.
- A nap you log or end by hand stays exactly as you left it. The sensor pass won’t move it or stretch it back out.
- Logging a bottle, a breast feed or a diaper ends the nap that’s running, so a feed at 3am closes the night stretch for you.
Reload sleep history under Sensors rebuilds the last two weeks from Home Assistant, which is the fix if a day looks wrong after the sensor was offline.
Alerts
Under Settings, then Notifications, the Sleep section can ping you when the sensor reports your baby falling asleep, going into deep sleep, coming back to light sleep, or waking up.
Nap prediction learns your baby’s rhythm from the naps on record and can warn you a set number of minutes before the next predicted sleep or wake.
If something isn’t working
“Home Assistant rejected the token (401).” Long-lived tokens stop working if they’re deleted in Home Assistant, if the account’s password changes, or if Home Assistant is restored from a backup older than the token. The expiry date shown in Home Assistant is not the problem. Create a fresh token and paste it in.
“Home Assistant is reachable and the token works, but it returned no sensors.” The connection is fine and the device isn’t in Home Assistant. Check the integration for your sock is set up and that its entities aren’t disabled.
It works at home and not out. Open the same URL in Safari on your phone with wifi off. A local address won’t load, by design, and that is the thing to swap for a public one. If a public address doesn’t load either, fix it in Home Assistant before coming back to the app.
Readings go blank or stale. A sock on its base reports nothing useful, and the app drops a zero heart rate rather than showing it. Values come back when the sock is back on the baby.
Anything else, email zoey-baby-support@gxlabs.co.