Here I am sharing my end-user findings and ideas on presence detection, notifications and UI, hoping that this less technical approach opens discussions and contribute to take home automation, and OH in particular, to what it should provide to end-user : simplicity, comfort, “intelligence”, universal usage, all hiding its technical complexity and advanced architecture.
I have worked on intra-building and on premises presence detection and would like to share my implementation for discussion and brainstorming. Arrival/departure is working pretty weel. Intra-building is still unsatisfying.
On premises
User location items have following states : home, arrival, departure, away. I tried ping-based detection, Owntracks, Tado location reporting, Synology Videostation geofence and none gave me acceptable reactivity. Finally I use Tasker with 3 geofences and Wifi detection to update states. I kepts ping tracking to determine who is home based on phone IP.
On Tasker side, the frequency of geolocation/Wifi detection is automatically adjuste depending on the location to improve precision and speed in detection.
A guest user item allows handling unknown users : keep some command systems disabled, such as audio/video, deactivate alarm and cameras but keep light switches enabled.
- Wifi connected = home
- Wifi disconnected + leaving near geofence (100m)=departure
- Wifi disconnected + leaving far geofence (500m) or after 5 min=away
- Wifi disconnected + entering medium geofence (200m)=arriving. If no garage door command received for 3 minutes or leaving geofence then back to away (for example when driving nearby but not returning home)
Door commands are triggered from a simple Tasker UI on the phone which also sends the name of the user supposed to arrive. Then in OH, a User_arriving_perdoor item will help OH to welcome properly the user depending from which gate it arrives (say Welcome back, Yann, tell user-related events or more)
Intra-building
I use all available events that report a user activity.
- Motion detection (Zwave movement sensors) but a 30 secs delay make location unreliable
- Door contacts
- Wallswitches: when one zwave lighting changes state without a prior command, it means that the command was triggered from a wallswich. I implemented a switch “proxy layer” so I can see if a light state change is related to a proxy command. Advantage of the layer is that you can “lock” switches by cancelling a command (sending an OFF after an unattended ON was received)
- Speech : the echo binding reports any speech and helps location. My concern is that not always the closest Echo responds to requests so location gets incorrect
- IR : IR receiver help locating users
- Cameras : presence detection reported by Synology Surveillance Station through HTTP
All these items belong to a room group. Each room has a LastPresence_Room item with an expiration delay.
Purpose of locating people at home is mainly to allow the notification sub-system to determine the best notification method (speech, color light, TV OSD notification, push to device, immediate or delayed) depending on “notification channels” available in the room, depending on the addressees of the message (all persons at home, all persons not at home, a burglar 
, a specific user), and depending on on-going activities (watching TV , criticity of the message and user notification preferences.
This works pretty well when 1 person is at home but location is of course unreliable when 2 or more are moving between rooms. This might be improved by some algorithmic logic using times to move between rooms or order of sensor triggering (which should give the direction of the movement).
I read with attention this tutorial and had not thought about the CO2 detection. I am sure we can find more tricky ways to improve this.
On top of this, I implemented a very simple “Alexa, follow me rule” which make Alexa tell when you enter a room and swiitch lights accordingly. It is for show-off but one can imagine triggering events based on users habits and wills with this tracking.
Running dynamic and lean Habpanel UIs (just starting with Habpanel…) that displays relevant commands depending on the user, the time of the day or the context would be nice. I am quite circumspect about home automation UIs that often look like a Boeing 747 cockpit or Tchernobyl power plants… Sure they are beautiful and a technical show-off demos for developers but they are nightmare for mates and children who are supposed to be end users. Home automation is not SCADA. Same architecture maybe, but different purposes.
UI challenge is to find the “best” interaction channel : speech, hard keys (long life to TV remotes), touchscreen : each has its strength and weakness depending on the situation.
One major point of tracking is both to provide cutting-edge automated comfort features and ensure individual privacy at the same time. On this 2nd point, I think that home automation systems miss for the moment individual privacy management. My mate and I are really touchy about this: for example, no way one can activate the cameras at home to spy his partner or locate him during the day. I believe these are interesting challenges to address.
