WTH Area activities

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

Areas of a house have activities that occupants are doing within that specific area. These activities influence a variety of settings on devices (lights, media player settings, motion sensitivity, ventilation fan levels, etc).

For example, in my house there is an input selection box for each Area with the typical activities automation may be setup for:

input_select:
  area_living_room_activity:
    name: Living Room Activity
    options:
      - None
      - TV
      - Movie
      - Gaming
      - Board Games
    initial: None

  area_kitchen_activity:
    name: Kitchen Activity
    options:
      - None
      - Dining
      - Cooking
      - Homework
      - Cleaning
    initial: None

  area_primary_bed_activity:
    name: Primary Bedroom Activity
    options:
      - None
      - Sleeping
    initial: None

A variety of automation are triggered when going to/from these activities. I’ve had to reproduce this for at least three different HA installations so far.

Being able to define a set of activity selections for an Area as standard part of HA would be super useful standardization of this.

2

Or at least a simple boolean if an area is occupied or not would also be helpful.
I know it’s easy to create some helpers for that but a neat little service to set an area occupied or not and read the information would be nice and groups everything together.