So we have 2 adults in the house with phones, which I can use to track location and do stuff like switch on cameras and door sensors when we both leave the house.
But we have a cleaner who comes once a week. If we both go out, everything arms but then we get endless notifications and and video clips.
I could create the cleaner a user on HA but I don’t what to give her that mich ‘power’ and ability to see all my stuff.
Any thoughts or suggestions on how I could grant her the ability to be present but nothing else? I need ‘Cleaner Mode’.
Since no one else should be able to just disarm everything, then a simple button is out of the question.
You need something like a security device or you need a preconfigured passive sensor.
A security device is a device to register something the cleaner know, have or is.
Know is like a password, which requires a way to enter it, like a keypad.
Have could be a RFID card, that then requires a RFID scanner
Is means biological features, so a fingerprint reader or eye scanner is needed then.
A preconfigured passive sensor could be a sensor that scans the arp tables of your router for the cleaners phone, which then would require cleaners phone to connect to your WIFI.
A combined solution could also be to register the bluetooth mac address of the cleaners phone, but then bluetooth needs to be turned on and maybe some phones scramble the mac address to prevent tracking, so the scrambling setting might need to be deactivated on the phone.
A simple bluetooth tracker could be a solution too, but those typically require a battery to be charged for it to work.
Image recognition of faces is not matured enough for this yet.
It is decent to distinct and select known faces, but to use it to distinct known faces from unknown is complex still and I guess that is what you want.
ANPR is pretty good, because the font is known and pretty easy on OCR software, but it requires the right conditions, like camera angle, lighting, minimized noise like rain, dust and darkness.
I have a Unifi network for my wifi and it may be possible to get an event when the cleaner joins and leaves the network, which I can then use to trigger automations. Will investigate and report back.