Sensors into the business world

Hi all, I’m the founder of a new tech company that helps businesses visualize, manage and plan their work spaces. (http://simple.space)

So uploading a floorplan and allowing interaction with an overlay of shapes and data on top is the easiest way to explain.

I want to tie SENSORS into this by allowing PiR (motion sensors) to capture if there’s people in meeting rooms, conference rooms or casual/informal spaces.

The goal: As an employee you can pull up our app and see which parts of the building have a free space to work in.

Naturally it also lets us correlate data like compare with “booked” calendar items to see who’s never attending their meetings… Businesses always complain they never have enough meeting rooms!

My Question: do you think a hub and a motion sensor can achieve this?

How do I want to do it? (DEVS!!)
Get a sensor to detect movement and report into an API hook (I.e. Hit a web page of ours),

Mesh: for bigger offices, I wonder how I can achieve this. I need to find out more on how the mesh network works!

Id love any feedback, comments and queries/feedback.

Maybe we can even open our app to the home market in the future, it might be more “appealing” than the usual home apps

Thoughts?

Occupancy sensing & tracking is a popular area of study with various existing products and platforms under development.

Drop my friend Jim a line at LiveSpace (for example) and he might have some technology or ideas to share. I’ll private message his personal email.

As @tgauchat says, many people are working on this problem from many different directions.

Depending on budget and whether you can count on people carrying or wearing something, there are a lot of existing solutions. Nothing cheap and easy yet. Some things in between that work for some situations.

See the following discussion topic (this is a clickable link)

In room detection of Occupancy

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Thanks @JDRoberts and @tgauchat but my goal is not to track every single employee.

Working in the space management field for about 4-5years now and the reason I started my own journey is this…

Heading down the path of tracking every employee causes a massive complexity and performance hit that slows all aspects of space management and increases required human (and other) resources to conduct a project.

One might say it is necessary for granularity but as with all things, we continued to find the disadvantages outweighed the benefits.

SO I’m seeking a more generic approach of gathering lots of data through integration points (calendars, payroll etc) and correlating this with sensor data, primarily in the “Occupied vs Unoccupied” spaces.

Purely want to detect if a small area is occupied or not and hit a URL.
Will email Jim :smile:

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See the previous discussion topic link. Generic people counters (not individual identifiers) are also discussed there.

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