I’ve started experimenting with using Life360 as my main source of presence sensors. I’m curious for anyone else who is using it with SmartThings - is there a way to have the app automatically check you into “Home” without having to share your location 24/7? My main use case here is for our nanny. I really just want Life360 to check her into our “home” so SmartThings knows she’s there. I don’t need to know where she is otherwise. I also don’t want her to have to manually check in on her phone every time she arrives.
Is there no way to automate this without enabling sharing everywhere? If not, I guess I can look into buying a presence sensor just for her.
Edit, I was wrong, I forgot it does have tracking disable (Incorrect statement: It doesn’t as far as I know.)
I’ve thought of these kind of issues and still don’t have a solution.
My current thought is to replace my garage door wireless keypad with a Zwave/Zigbee one sometime, and issue per person codes. No good keypad exists that I’m aware of… thinking of repurposing a door lock for this, but becomes a mess.
Do you know what the actual settings are in his phone, though? I have a place set up in Life360 as a place called “home.” This is tied to the “home” in SmartThings. But I don’t see anything in the Life360 app where I can choose to only share my location for a specific place. I can only turn location sharing on or off, and if it’s on, it’s apparently on all the time and tracking everywhere I go, sharing it with everyone in the circle. I’m still not clear how to set up the scenario you’re talking about where the phone only shares crossing of a particular place’s geofence.
@brbeaird Did you ever figure your original question out on this thread [quote=“brbeaird, post:1, topic:24431”]
I really just want Life360 to check her into our “home” so SmartThings knows she’s there. I don’t need to know where she is otherwise. I also don’t want her to have to manually check in on her phone every time she arrives.
Is there no way to automate this without enabling sharing everywhere? If not, I guess I can look into buying a presence sensor just for her.
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I am in the exact same boat as I found the ST native presence location absolutely sucks. In my case I had the ST presence feature be the trigger to turn off/on Smart Home Monitor. Because it rarely detected the location of both are phones, it would trigger false intrusion alarms constantly as it would not recongnize us returning home.
I installed the Life 360 app on mine an my wife’s phone, but my wife does not like the fact that it essentially shows her constant location. This was essentially what you were after as well, based on your orginal post. You didnt care to see where your nanny was throughout the day, rather simply when she was inside the “geofence” around your house as it would then communicate to ST.
Did you ever figure out a workaround. When we tried setting my wifes “Location Service” setting to off on Life 360. It seemed to lock her last known location which at the time was are house. As a result, ST would think she never left the house and constantly showed her as present even if she left the house for work.
I honestly can’t remember what my results were when I tested this. I feel like SmartThings DID detect me entering the “Home” geofence even when Life360 location tracking was switched off, but I’m not sure.
The bigger problem for me is that for whatever reason, it just wasn’t reliable enough. I tried this with my wife’s phone and our nanny’s, but they would sporadically just stop being picked up by ST as coming or leaving the house. I don’t know if that’s because they manually closed the app sometimes without thinking about it or what. In the end, I got one of the new presence sensors for the nanny, and that has actually been working quite reliably.
Like a physical presence sensor that attaches to a key chain? If so, does it have enough range that when the nanny who ever has the sensor on their key chain were to pull into the drive way would ST being able to pick it up and say turn off Smart Home Monitor or turn on lights unlock doors etc?