“Connected health isn't just about the quantified body,” says Philippe Schwarz, president of Withings. “It is about the health of the house. There are some bad particles in the air, but also feeling safe in your home is part of a healthy environment.” His words carry a faintly spiritual ring, but they're also a pitch for the Withings Home, the newest gadget in the company’s canon of smart devices. It's a nanny cam with upgraded intelligence: Not only can it send images to your phone via an app, it can also serve as a autonomous sentry, alerting you to strange activity in the house thanks to facial recognition and air-quality sensors.

The Home supplies users with a live, high-definition video feed of their house. The white-and-wood device—it almost looks like a little candle for your mantel—has a 135-degree viewing angle on the room it’s in, night vision, and two-way audio. Schwarz says it works similarly to the Dropcam home security gadget, but that the Home’s software has facial recognition features built in. “We’ve taken video monitoring to the next level," says Schwarz. "It has a filtering mechanism and can detect specifically some items, so we can differentiate from my daughter coming home versus someone we don’t know.”

The Home detects unusual activity, which is then logged in the app. Withings

Likewise, for audio, Withings has programmed the device to discern between, say, a baby crying and a motorcycle engine. Whenever something is a awry, users get a push notification on their phone. If the user chooses to view the notification later, it gets saved in a timeline. (How far back the timeline goes will be based on a pay-for-space subscription model.)

These clever systems for detecting abnormalities also work with the Home’s air quality sensors. These pick up on volatile organic compounds, or harmful gases often released by cleaning products or building materials. When the Home alerts users about harmful chemicals, it also points out the likely culprit. “If it’s a cleaning product left in the baby’s room, maybe we can just put it away or put in a closet. So it's not, ‘my house is completely infected,’ but it’s a lot that’s around actionability,” Schwarz says.

Even with its slightly laid back, Cool Dad approach to problems around the house, the Withings Home is really bound to appeal more to parents than to anyone else. By way of explaining the Home, Schwarz often leans on the baby monitor use case: Home is touted with recognizing the sound of an infant wailing; the finish on the new baby furniture could be what's releasing toxic chemicals. Plus, the bottom of the device can even glow red or blue, like a night light. That's a hard sell to city-dwelling adults, but a far easier one to new (and anxious) parents.

Withings Home will cost $219. Check out the company here.