Knowing that I can only go from my Family Room to the Hallway or Kitchen could be used in presence detection and tracking.
Given that Areas are non-overlapping representations of physical spaces, this could be implemented by adding geocoordinate-based polygons to each area.
In other words, assign each area a physical location on earth (like zones) so that you can know if they are next to each other.
Using 2d space to represent positioning that can be in 3d wouldn’t work very well imho. And it seems overly complicated. You just need a list of neighbouring areas for each area. But personally I just don’t see value in this. I don’t see how that would help in presence detection.
What method are you wanting to use to track the person’s location? I’m not sure GPS is the mods effective way to do so when moving small distances within a home.
My thoughts is that presence detection within a building can be improved. A person has to be in one room and can only move to a connected room. So, if a sensor in a far away room goes off, it is an errand detection. Right now my wife and I are in the family room and we are the only people in the house. To get to our office you need to go through two rooms. But the office lights keep going on. If I point the office presence sensor one way, it seems to detect motion from a heat vent. Pointing it in another direction it picks up outside motion. I would need to fix the presence sensor to a stable base in order to use zones. But it should know that nobody is even heading that way.
You’re asking quite a lot of presence detection!
I use Bluetooth proxies and the Bermuda integration to gather data about which room I might be in, then the Bayesian integration to give an estimate of which is the most likely room, taking into account other factors like movement, time of day, whether devices like the TV are in use. It’s surprisingly accurate and smooths out most of the flip-flops you get from trackers alone.
I agree with you. Thanks for the information on the Bayesian integration. When I get some time, I will try it. It seems to me that the HA team could implement some really good presence capabilities. Maybe it is something like what I described but I think they are much cleverer that I am. So they can come up with much more useful capabilities.
Id be looking into why your presence in the office is triggering with no-one there rather than trying to make it understand where you might be.
If you’re using mmWave you might need to move it or use zones, for example when I first got a mmWave sensor in my office, the fans in my server rack or my 3d printer would set it off, so I tweaked it.
If you’re using something else there should be other ways to tweak them or maybe you might need to switch presence detection method.
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I agree with this. If there is something peculiar about your hardware or software setup that is causing false positives, the way to handle that is probably (a) fix the hardware/software or, if that’s not an option, (b) add logic to your automations/sensors/etc to account for the peculiarities.
Going up a few thousand feet in generality, it is actually extremely useful to be able to detect peculiar events. For example, if I’m not at home, and a bunch of motion detectors go off, I have automations in place to alert me of that fact. That’s alarm-system category information.
So I’m not sure that giving HA knowledge about how rooms are connected would improve the platform; I think the platform already gives you the tools to account for false positives in your sensors.
I’m happy to help with more specific use cases!