Indeed.
akbooer your Dream Green House link in turn links to a Smart Things solution which is a propriety key fob that you can associate with individuals or objects (like a car). Demo: SmartSense Presence. It looks like a reasonably robust solution. There is user tear down of the fob.
[quote=“RichardTSchaefer, post:2, topic:175326”]There are a lot of strategies for a single occupant. For multiple occupants that come and go at different times I can think of a couple of strategies …
All make some type of assumption to infer presence, or lack thereof …
…
[ul][li]Ping Sensor on everyone’s phone using LAN IP address. Need to handle false hits when Phone is sleeping[/li][/ul]
…[/quote]
There exists the Unlock with Wifi Android App that prevents the lockscreen from activating when you are at home by detecting whether your phone is connected to your Wifi network.
It would seem this logic could be readily adapted for presence detection in general. In Android there is “Settings > Wifi > Advanced > Keep WiFi on during sleep.” to address the phone sleeping issue (I prefer my phone to be able to update various bits of data when sleeping anyway).
An installed Phone App could also identify persons. This could be done by the App can sending a MAC(?) or other address. Relying on dynamically allocated IP addressed wouldn’t work. If all else failed you could require an Phone App User to enter their name manually.
It does seem that there would have to be a pulse (or ping). Whether that ought be pushed from the Phone side or pulled from the Vera side, I don’t know.
Edit: There is another thread, “Wireless Sensor Tag System”, looking at www.wirelesstag.net for presence detection, among other things. Conceptually it looks good. It has a URL based API which facilitates vera integration. Unfortunately the implementation is reported to be flakey …
[quote=“mbairhead, post:32, topic:172570”]Just got mine this weekend and I’m disappointed.
Occupancy Monitor - This is actually what I was hoping to get out of this, put one tag in the glove box of each of our cars and when they both are gone, run an “away” scene. Of course this won’t work since it loses communication with the tags so often.[/quote]
Edit2: There is also the [Plugin] Google Latitude (Beta), the kind of solution previously mentioned by RichardTSchaefer. Note that Google latitude also works off Wifi detection. So you don’t need battery draining GPS to be on all the time.
Edit3: Fixed urls.