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I'm working on a POC to try and find desk occupancy in an office. The aim is to identify which desk is occupied and how many are free and where are the free ones. Also I would like to identify who is sitting at what desk. What are the ways I could do that?

Some of the options I have are to track Bluetooth devices signal strength, Wi-Fi probes, IR or ultrasound options.

One idea is to use active RFID tags and one RFID reader per desk group. A desk group typically contains 4 to 6 desks/laptops.

I'm at the moment trying to determine occupancy through the laptop placed at the desk. As long as laptop is on the desk I'm happy to assume the desk is occupied. Even when the person takes a break this should work. The RFID reader can be integrated to say PI and send the data to cloud to trigger other events. I'm not sure how this will work.

Wi-Fi probes to detect the connections to the nearest router was initial idea. But I have done obligations to track the people without consent. That's parked for now.

Has anyone did this? Any ideas how to get this?

Aurora0001
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PNDev
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7 Answers7

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Infrared detection of body heat sounds like your best bet, with sensors in the ceiling above each desk.

Triangulation of signal strength is a nightmare, even assuming that you can force everyone to carry a device.

You might consider something like checking if the PC at that desk is logged in or not, but that relies on people remembering to log out.

Ideally, you want a solution which does not rely on anyone doing something. Infrared seems best.

Mawg
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Maybe a light barrier between the two front legs of the desk? Assuming they are not standing desks some part of the leg or chair will interrupt the barrier most of the time.

At least at my work all of the time. But maybe that is because we all work on computers.

findusl
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Considering all the conversation from above, I think the following should satisfy your needs:

  1. Have RFID sensor under each table

  2. Have RFID tag under each chair so it can be reported to nearest table whenever/wherever used

  3. Have a pressure sensor under each chair to identify if anybody seating on it. Disk type pressure sensor can be easily put in chair or back-support. Example of such sample only for reference purpose: ASIN: B073WD9Z18 (though I am not affiliated with this product).

Aurora0001
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JPI
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Like JPI says in his 3rd point, how about having a weight/pressure sensor on the chairs sending the weight measurements periodically? This would be the most fool proof as RFID can mislead if a chair is just moved towards a table without anyone sitting on it. Pressure sensor will actually give you the info about occupancy and then that could be combined with the RFID to check which desk has the closest proximity to a chair.

Hope it helps.

Subbu
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Another option is if using a hotdesk feature on the desk phone, you could read that information.

And with the previous mention of using the PC to sense logged in user you could force log out after a set time, i.e if shifts all finish at 5pm then 530 it could prompt the user to log off, if no response then log them out, if they are working back they could opt to snooze the auto logout for X hours.

Falz
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You can do a Wi-Fi sniffer with an ESP8266 and you will be able to know how many smartphones are in the vicinity, in this way you will be able to know in a very approximate way the number of people in the office.

You can see it as an alternative to the deployment of a sensor (whatever the type of sensor chosen) by desktop.

GitHub Project - ESP8266 WifiSniffer

Aurora0001
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tyncho08
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I found not one, but two, solutions at Hackster for exactly this problem:

https://www.hackster.io/OpenSensorsIO/workspace-occupancy-sensors-28af77

https://www.hackster.io/data-innovation-lab-axa-germany/real-time-workspace-occupancy-sensing-based-on-aws-iot-bd082e

[Updat] and here's a bed occupancy project which could be adapted

Mawg
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