I’m not very sure whether this question is relevant here.
We are planning to develop a PHP web application to detecting room occupancy. One of our department is planning to give the flexibility for seating arrangements for their staffs, that means there is fixed room for anyone and you can sit on any of the empty rooms or the room which haven’t reach the maximum occupancy.
Problem is somehow we need to detect the occupancy. We are planning to buy some devices which can able to communicate with our web application via wifi and also can able communicate with the staff who is sitting in that room. Eg like tapping staff card or the staff can key in their presence on the device etc.
Anybody having some ideas about such devices?? please bear with me if i ask this question in wrong place.
If you just want to count how many people are in a room, that’s easy. There are many commercial systems that do this. The low-cost ones almost all have an infrared beam detection system across the doorway with two beams (So you can detect the direction the person is going). You can also make one of these yourself without too much difficulty. They aren’t perfect (for example, if someone is carrying a large package and goes through the entranceway they may be counted as two people), but they’re pretty good. Doesn’t really have anything to do with smartthings, but we do discuss This type of application here occasionally. See the following thread, which includes a link to a sample do it yourself project of this type.
There also more expensive systems based on cameras of different types.
If you want to track where specific people are, again there are many commercial systems that do this. In the last year or two ibeacons have become popular for some conferences and large events. But then each person has to wear a bracelet with an ibeacon on it. Check out radius networks for devices and projects of this type.
So the short answer is that there are many of these systems available, and also many discussions of do it yourself projects of this type, but they don’t really have very much to do with the smartthings platform, Which is more focused on home automation.
To find commercial systems, just Google “people counting systems.”