What is the best sensor for a person at home or out-of-home

Hi,

Is there a way to track if home occupants are in the house or outside? I am not looking for a room-by-room solution to turn lights on or off but want to use the presence (or absence) of home members into automation and alerts for say garage door open/close event.

Since everyone has a phone with location enabled, is there a way to track phone as a sensor within HA?

Thanks,

Pankaj

Most accurate way that I have found is to use device tracking with my router. So if a users phone is connected to WiFi they are home. We use the App but have found that can hit or miss.

When you define a Person you can have have multiple trackers. My understanding is the status of home or away is based on the last update.

HI Neil,

Thanks for the pointer and using router’s connectivity sounds practical in my context.

I found following for Netgear Orbi which should do the job and also added the MAC for my phone to the device list:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/netgear/

The HA does not show any error and starts properly but I cannot find any sensor specific to Netgear in the entire list so not sure if I did it incorrectly or not looking at the right place.

Thanks!

  1. If there are stationary trackers (non-GPS trackers, e.g., a router or Bluetooth device tracker) presenting the state home , the tracker most recently updated will be used.
  2. If there are trackers of type gps , then the most recently updated tracker will be used.
  3. Otherwise, the latest tracker with state not_home will be used.

Person - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)

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I had used the Apple Tv to detect who is home or not. Has been working ok, but it is flaky now. Hit and miss. Maybe due to recent updates of apple tv firmware.

I found another possible solution that uses the bluetooth to track phones. Seems to work ok. It’s call Monitor and can be found in the share your project section.

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Not sure if you looked at this, I have this in my configuration.yaml. See if there is an equivalent platform support for netgear.

device_tracker:

  • platform: synology_srm
    host: 192.168.1.1
    password: xxxxxxxx
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Thanks @ASNNetworks, @duceduc & @VikingBlod (again!)!!

I have not used “Persons” and “Zones” so far and probably good to spend some time reading documentation. The Monitor also seems promising and would test these out coming weeks and let you guys know how it goes.
Thanks!

The app has never worked for me.

I’ve had the app on my and my wife’s phones for several months and it always shows as “Home” and the geocode as our home address, even when we are not home. Is there something more to it than just running the app on our phones?

We’ve been using Life360 and never had problems. Not thrilled about 3rd party tracking us, but until something better and reliable is out…

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It can only work if you HA instance is accessible outside of your home network.

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@nappyjim Life360 seems impressive but a question, if it boils down to around $4/month plan then would using Nabu Casa which is $5/month a better option?

But Life360 has other features like driving speed etc but I am only focused on HA integration.

We use the free version of Life360.

I tried nabucasa, but it only updates location when you use the app or something like that. My wife hardly uses it so this isnt an option for reliable tracking for us.

Adding an update to an old thread started by me.

So finally after trying few options, I settled for ICMP integration which essentially pings the device and infers the response as the status of “home” or “away”.

This one is robust and precise enough for my needs and does not drain the battery as GPS location would.

Yes, of cource you need to set the location permission to always. But there are more finer settings on how frequent and with what accurracy the location is transmitted. The app works for me but I have all the setting at the lowest as I do not need to exactly know where everybody is, just a ball park figure. So I don’t mind that the correct location can be of 20-70 minutes. But you can set it to very accurate and very frequently updating the location and that should work wonderfully. You should also set up zones, first your home zone and also others if you need to know more that there ‘away’.