Amazon's Alexa Together caregiver service is now more useful if you want to know a loved one's specific activities. The company has added custom alerts that ping up to 10 caregivers when there's particular smart home activity. You'll know if the care receiver opened a sensor-equipped medicine cabinet, for instance, or whether the bedroom light turned on at the right time in the morning. You can enable custom alerts through the "More" section in the Alexa App. Alexa Together costs $20 per month or $199 per year, and requires at least one Echo device for the person receiving support. It's currently available only in the US and requires Amazon accounts for both the caregiver and the care recipient.

Sense is a bright-orange box that sits in your electrical breaker box and gives in-depth insight into your home's entire power usage. The whole system is quite clever and--thankfully--free of any monthly charges. But it learns very slowly, and that's likely to frustrate you. Sense works by electromagnetically listening to the power flowing along the two hot wires that run from your electric meter to your breakers. By measuring the current flow a million times each second, Sense can observe changes in load with precise detail and, based on a machine-learning database, attempt to identify the footprint of different devices from the noise they generate. This means it can tell you exactly how much energy different appliances in your house use, and it does all of this without requiring sensors or smart plugs on each device.