Apple Watch as presence sensor?

It’s been a while since I’ve been back on these forums or made any changes to my smart home as everything has been working great for around 12 months now…except the presence sensors…

I must have change the batteries in both 3 times already (broken clips galore). I got to thinking that maybe my phone would be a better option…or better yet my watch!

Is the phone option any good? I’ve set it up as a test to alert me when my phone arrives and leaves.

Is the Apple Watch option possible?

Different things work for different people. The following should be of interest (this is a clickable link)

As far as the Apple Watch, series 1 and two don’t have location services.

The brand new Apple Watch Series 3 does have location services, but it doesn’t work the same way that a phone does. In order to help preserve battery life, instead of regularly broadcasting its location, the location is recorded internally and is available for query by approved apps.

That means that you can use “find my phone” to find an Apple Watch Series 3, but you can’t use Geopresence like IFTTT location.

So I’m guessing it won’t work with SmartThings, because you won’t get that “cross the border” Geopresence event. But I haven’t tried it to be sure, I don’t have a series 3 watch myself.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8094443?start=0&tstart=0

Location is only sent when someone requests to see it (it is not transmitted on a regular interval).

@ady624 said he may consider writing a solution for the series 3 Apple Watch if he gets one… maybe it is time to start a collection… :wink:

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IPhone presence is unreliable at the moment for most people. IOS 11 seemed to of caused a disconnect between ST and iPhone presence. I’m not sure how reliable Android is for detecting presence.

Well less than 1 day into trying to use my iPhone instead the results are pretty poor. I went out to dinner last night, and 5min after getting back home it informed me that I had just left. It’s yet to tell me I have arrived again!

I wonder if something could be made that checks for the presence of a device on the wifi network, and can be aware of presence that way…

Like this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/143055/how-to-detect-a-mobile-device-when-it-connects-to-a-home-wifi-network

Sure. :sunglasses:

There is detailed discussion of A couple of different Wi-Fi presence methods in the presence FAQ so you can see how people have already done this with SmartThings. It will depend on what router you have, though.