Which is the best way to detect presence in a room?

Configuration
81

Thanks for this idea. Reading the Bayesian documentation it sounds like it would be a sensor per room. Therefore it could identify multiple rooms. Have you found a way to combine them to identify the room that a person is in? Or, am I overthinking this?

82

Bluetooth would be the way to do presence detection by person/device in my opinion.
Thereā€™s a Room-assistant addon and Bluetooth tracking integration Iā€™m not familiar with
, but check out this post:

83

Thatā€™s right.

I had motion sensors in each room anyway, and I added Bluetooth proxies with the Bermuda integration to track phone and watch.

But thereā€™s also time of day - 4am and Iā€™m probably in the bedroom, and so on - and things like the Xbox - if itā€™s on, thereā€™s a good chance Iā€™m in the study. If you think about it, thereā€™s quite a lot of data you can use.

I have a Bayesian calculation for each room giving the probability of it being occupied (probability is an attribute of the binary sensor), and a template to pick the room with the highest probability.

The thing is, it doesnā€™t have to be 100% for it to work. Quite often, Iā€™ll be in the living room, say, watching TV, with my phone charging in the kitchen, the dog wandering around and the Xbox left on downloading a game. Iā€™ll get something like:

  • Kitchen 52%
  • Living room 84%
  • Study 31%

The template will say (correctly) that Iā€™m in the living room.

1 Like
84

Thank you for the informaiton on the Bayesian integration. I read through the documentation.

I have not found however a situation where, when I know there are only two people in a home*, and motion is sensed in two different rooms within seconds of each other, to then automatically know to just turn off the lights in all of the other rooms. Given the WAF and other factors (such as a guest mode turned on which would have it ignore any such logic), it is unfortunate but custom programming is the best way in such a situation as there are too many custom considerations to take into accountā€¦

Since this is all done ā€œon a shoestring budgetā€, all sensors are PIR and I am unable to differentiate between human and pet, erring on the side of caution is always best practice

85

What Bluetooth proxies do you recommend?

86

Iā€™ve been using M5Stack Atom Lite, primarily because theyā€™re small and they come in a case.

2 Likes