Presence-Sensing & Particular People

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  • chris_j_hunter
    Automated Home Legend
    • Dec 2007
    • 1713

    Presence-Sensing & Particular People

    wonder how clever it's possible to be with presence sensing ... eg: the following scenario :

    make a pot of tea, want to be called when it's ready to pour ... four-button module, one for each type of tea & so for particular times ... when time's up, whoever made the tea needs to be prompted, but could have wandered-off ... don't want to worry the whole house ... want to inform just that person (dip the lights slightly, message on a nearby MFP, short buzz, message on his / her iPhone, message on nearest iPod Touch, whatever) ...

    so : can Cortex keep sufficient track of people & things to allow this ???
    Our self-build - going further with HA...
  • toscal
    Moderator
    • Oct 2005
    • 2061

    #2
    Tricky one this.
    Have no idea if this would work in Cortex. Since I don't have any Idratek stuff. But one way would be to have at least one presence detector in each room, some may need 2. Or some form of sensor to know when a person has crossed the threshold of a room (ie gone through a door way, door sensor won't work since the door maybe open and you don't close it).
    Now to get to a certain location in a house you normally need to go through various rooms in a particular order. So to get to the study, you may need to go from kitchen, to dinning room, to lounge then to study. So if these sensors are triggered in that order then you must be in the Study. Only problem would be if you left the study, but I guess you could then do a similar thing from the study to the next location. A few things would muck this up. You would need a timing window to determine the movement from one room to another. ie if sensor in kitchen is trigged then sensor in dining room needs to be triggered within a certain time and so on. Or another person is also in the kitchen and decides to leave later than the one making the tea.
    To minimise this you could look at using RFID technology http://www.iautomate.com/php-bin/eco...tegory_33.html
    But then you would need several readers to minimize the possibility of the system thinking you are in several locations at once.
    Or you could use a paging system http://www.lrs-europe.com/

    or this model

    Their coaster pagers are a neat idea.
    Another idea would be to use bluetooth.
    Good luck
    Last edited by toscal; 28 August 2008, 02:26 PM.
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    • chris_j_hunter
      Automated Home Legend
      • Dec 2007
      • 1713

      #3
      not seen the coaster before - looks a good idea ... wonder if there's a badge version, too ?

      Going via iPhone / iPod Touch seems best, though ... they being most likely what people would have on them, because of their great (global) functionality & connectivity ... must say, though, 'really do hope IdrateK are working on an iPhone app' / interface ! Not only for this sort of thing, but also for drawing more people in to their particular HA world ... !
      Last edited by chris_j_hunter; 28 August 2008, 09:42 PM.
      Our self-build - going further with HA...

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      • Gumby
        Moderator
        • May 2004
        • 437

        #4
        It's a very interesting idea. At the moment Cortex doesn't have any identifying information. I believe someone has recently patented (or tried) the idea of using Bluetooth for this tracking on the assumption that everyone carries a phone. Personally I don't take my phone to bed, or into the shower, so I will seek other means.
        ----------------------
        www.gumbrell.com

        Comment

        • Karam
          Automated Home Legend
          • Mar 2005
          • 863

          #5
          Toscal,

          In fact Cortex does precisely as you suggest - it uses information collected from PIR sensors, door sensors and others, together with a knowledge of room interconnectivity and a bunch of heuristics to work out occupancy of rooms. Obviously it cannot identify specific people without more specialist sensors such as the suggested RFID or bluetooth methods. However it can cope with tracking more than one person, though it gets trickier as you increase numbers and depending on the physical structure of the property.

          I think the sort of thing Chris is talking about would need personal identification tracking, but perhaps without this its possible to do something to a certain degree and with less accuracy for example by focusing on the room with most recently changed occupancy.

          Alternatively a coded but perhaps not so obtrusive signal could be broadcast to all occupied rooms presently allowing messages - such as flashing LEDs or, on the new DFP, alternating LCD backlight colours in a Chris specific code . But, I personally prefer the idea of a broadcast message to occupied rooms shouting 'Chris, get your *@!! in here - your tea's ready !'. The intercom broadcast scope is itself automatically regulated (to avoid disturbing people who might be in bed for example) so it needn't be too intrusive

          Comment

          • Simon George
            Automated Home Jr Member
            • Apr 2008
            • 28

            #6
            sorry for any thread hijack, but do you have a date for the new DFP Karam ?

            Thanks

            Comment

            • Karam
              Automated Home Legend
              • Mar 2005
              • 863

              #7
              Originally posted by Simon George View Post
              sorry for any thread hijack, but do you have a date for the new DFP Karam ?

              Thanks
              It has been a long road and I hope we're nearing the end of it ... who'd be in manufacturing ? . We've had some pre-production models since late July, probably see a tiny trickle of production units this month to urgent cases and more mainstream production hopefully by end of next. We'll make a proper announcement to automated home and on our site when we have greater confidence in the production schedule.
              Last edited by Karam; 6 September 2008, 12:31 AM. Reason: typo

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              • Kevin
                Moderator
                • Jan 2004
                • 558

                #8
                These tags are interesting because they are inconspicuous and read range is up to 8m it seems.. I am not sure if having a shorter range sensor at doorways would be better though. The costs of the readers would be prohibitive for a residential setup though.



                If you do want to experiment with Bluetooth then there is a xAP application available that outputs identifiers for individual BT devices in range of a PC from http://www.mi4.biz (xAP Blue). This directly creates a device presence signal in Cortex.

                K

                Comment

                • chris_j_hunter
                  Automated Home Legend
                  • Dec 2007
                  • 1713

                  #9
                  >Bluetooth ...

                  sounds a good approach, though Bluetooth can be one of the things people have switched-off to extend battery life ... presumably the xAP application doesn't get into pairing etc ... ?

                  >RFID ...

                  increasingly pervasive, of course, commercially, so hopefully it might become affordable, before too-long ... ?

                  OTOH, the solution to my example scenario seems to be something called Tea Timer, one of the iPhone app's, which works just about perfectly for the example situation ...

                  still, it was a random example, and there are many other scenarios where the function would be useful ... albeit the intercom ones & 'call alert might all be done via the iPhone (it being more than likely people would have their 'phone on / nearby their person just about all the time)

                  which thought caused me to think that maybe the intercom function of Idratek might be redundant, 'though maybe not - ie: it might be more reliable !

                  looking forward to seeing news of the new DFP modules (if I wanted more of the MFPs, should I order them now, I wonder - we have three, another five was what we planned) ...
                  Last edited by chris_j_hunter; 7 September 2008, 07:10 PM. Reason: typos
                  Our self-build - going further with HA...

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                  • Kevin
                    Moderator
                    • Jan 2004
                    • 558

                    #10
                    Originally posted by chris_j_hunter View Post
                    >Bluetooth ...

                    presumably the xAP application doesn't get into pairing etc ... ?
                    It doesn't require pairing at all- in fact one user reported that he lived so close to a main road that he could tell at what time the same people passed each day...

                    K

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                    • Gumby
                      Moderator
                      • May 2004
                      • 437

                      #11
                      Makes you wonder if it would be a good security feature. After all, it wouldn't be the first time a criminal got done because of their mobile...
                      ----------------------
                      www.gumbrell.com

                      Comment

                      • Kevin
                        Moderator
                        • Jan 2004
                        • 558

                        #12
                        Now that is a most interesting thought ..... although the phone/service provider likely couldn't identify the user easily via the BT ID... but if they were a suspect it would be helpful...

                        K
                        Last edited by Kevin; 8 September 2008, 12:00 AM.

                        Comment

                        • KirasHome
                          Automated Home Jr Member
                          • Oct 2006
                          • 37

                          #13
                          I have to admit I keep looking at this every 6 months or so, there are so many ways you could make use of the info in HA terms if you knew exactly where specific people were in the house.
                          Example: You have an alarm system that is permanently active, if a sensor gets triggered, first thing it does is check if an authorised person is nearby, if so it resets the sensor for say 5 secs. If there isn't an authorised person nearby it triggers the alarm. Great if your in a house on your own, or if you have pets. Put a tag on the pet's collar and leave the alarm on all night.
                          Example: You want to direct notification to a specific person (eg "Your tea is ready") :-)
                          Example: You want to avoid room occupancy issues where you have an open plan house.
                          Example: you want to be warned if your dog has gone into the larder :-)
                          Example: you want to have your music/tv follow you round the house.
                          Example: the house unlocks the front door as you approach.
                          Etc, etc.

                          I figure the easiest way to do this would be to have people carry something like an RFID tag. You could have it as a watch (http://www.hy-smart.com/rfid-tag/watch-tag.html), have it as a charm on a neck chain etc, a tag clipped to a pet's collar - you may notice a theme here :-).

                          How to detect the location of the tag gets a bit more interesting. Most RFID reader are quite short range, so you'd need multiple readers to cover a room. The longer range ones have the problem that you might not be able to tell exactly which room your currently in if your next to the wall.

                          A more elegant solution would be to have say 4 omni-directional readers mounted at the corners of the house and then triangulate the location of the tag in much the same way that GPS system does it. In theory you should be able to be quite accurate with that. Combine it with a 3d plan of the house and you know where the tag is. You could also use it to cover gardens as well.

                          Security: RFID tags are quite easy to read and fake, so I would be relucant to use it for unlocking the house. The flip side of that is virtually no one uses RFID to lock their house so the chances of a criminal type have a scanner and realising he needs to clone an RFID tag to unlock the house are small.

                          Bad news: Cost and trying to find a system that can actually do this.

                          Bluetooth phones: Good point: they are becoming univerisal. Bad point: People often put them down when they get into the house. We periodically have to ring SWMBO's phone to find it.

                          Apologies - a bit of a brain dump :-)

                          Jamie

                          Comment

                          • n07tv
                            Automated Home Sr Member
                            • May 2004
                            • 52

                            #14
                            I used to work in access control. Always looking to improve on short range RFID tags (hiprox, mifare, hid etc) as they worked a treat for convenience of being contactless but they were still prone to skimming.

                            Best method is, and i think always will be, something which is wired or connected. We ended up using iButtons a lot ... yes you can emulate them, but the sheer number of bits in the IDs would take a while to crack even using brute force :-). Can't see a burglar standing their with a serial number generator lpugged into a port for hours.

                            I have a stainless iButton port in the door frame wired to a small PIC based module running some custom firmware. It toggles a relay when a valid iButton is inserted.

                            When I leave, I lock the doors and the Cortex automatically arms, when i return, press the ibutton to the reader, hallway light flashes 'disarmed' and I unlock the door.

                            I got the idea from watching Weatherspoons barstaff logging on to their cash tills with iButtons.

                            N.

                            Comment

                            • jcmiguel
                              Automated Home Jr Member
                              • Apr 2008
                              • 38

                              #15
                              Bluetooth

                              I was looking at this and remembered about this thread. Why not a presence detector for the security system in which cortex identify your presence and DFP2 politely ask for the password to disable the alarm system? Of course you will have to remember turning on mobile BT before entering the property.

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