How To Determine If Wife Goes to Work?

I need to programmatically determine if my wife went to work.

We are an iOS family and already use WiFi, HE geofencing, etc. to determine when she arrives and departs from home.

Any ideas on how to to accomplish this?

If she does take her phone with her everytime, then presence based on fixed phone IP connected to wifi works perfectly. Im using this for years and works 100% of time. HE Driver is called "iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor" and its for all type of devices using wifi. Once its disconnected/connected from/to router, you can run rules as you wish

Life360 on her phone will do it for you.
I get an announcement when my wife leaves home and one when she arrives at work

You can also use a combination of these, I haven't personally, but I think plenty of people do use combined presence in some form, typically wifi, geofence and some cloud based system like life360. There are app(s) or rule examples here on the Community that may help.

Or you could just give her a call...? Sorry, couldn't resist :slightly_smiling_face:

Oh, and in terms of an alternate technology, you could look at Bluetooth beacons, but personally I would put it way down the list and only as part of some kind of combined presence setup.

Important question is, whether you want to know your wife left home or went to work and not somewhere else :wink:

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Why do I feel like I initiate these descents into the depths of a topic... Maybe it's because I do.... :slight_smile:

To bring it back on topic, it feels like wifi and cloud services, alongside HE's geofencing are your current options that, in my experience, are the easiest to setup and well supported by Hubitat and those here on the Community. If you are an Apple family then you may want to seek out Community drivers to best support WiFi presence with iPhones.

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Most important, happy Australia Day to @sburke781

I use a combination of four different methods to detect the presence of an iPhone on the network. None of them are 100% accurate. I then use a presence combiner and if ALL methods show the person gone I decide they are gone. Otherwise if ANY shows they are home I decide they are home. It works remarkably well as long as no one turns off wifi.

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True, true, thanks Brad. Sorry to steal air-time on this unrelated thread, but as much as I wanted to spend more time in my HA setup this morning it turned out I spent time with my family which is a precious thing at the moment. I also got a paid day off work, just saying, what's not to like.... :slight_smile:

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I use Life360 for this, in combination with Multi-Place to provide route information on the best route to take to/from work given current traffic conditions.

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I don't control her work network but on the off chance that her phone is assigned a static IP address, iPhone Wifi Presence Sensor works even when the phone (and IP address) are on a network other than my Hubitat hub?

I need to know if my wife went to work because that means she drove the EV and it needs to be charged.

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If we're currently using HE's geofencing to determine when she arrives and departs from home, how do I also use it to determine when she arrives at work?

Completely unhelpful smart arse answer:
I put motion sensors in the kitchen and the bedroom. If she's not one of those two places then she must not be at home.

More serious answer:
We use Life360 on our phones for this purpose. I set up locations in it for home, work, and school for the kids.

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The various "wifi presence" options available on HE will merely report whether the phone is connected to your wifi network or not. It won't tell whether the phone is connected to a work wifi network. And while this might be technically feasible to use these methods on a different network for all practical purposes it is not. You could install a second instance of a geofencing app like Life360 and have her "work" location be the one you monitor.

Would it perhaps be easier to determine whether the car had been driven?

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Maybe, but I doubt it. It's a dumb EV using a dumb charger.

She drives our EV to work Monday - Friday and arrives home after electricity rates have risen above the most economical tier. Therefore, the EV will not start charging until midnight, when rates return to their lowest cost - but only if she plugs it in.

Therefore, I'm attempting to identify when the EV needs to be charged and hasn't been plugged in, which is any Monday - Friday, if she went to work that day, at 12:05 AM, if our power usage is less than 5 kWh.

In this case, wife education is best approach. To plug a car everytime she arrives home. It took a while in my case, but I let her pay a gas few times when she didnt charge the car (I have PHEV) and it worked :rofl:.

If you have HomeBridge, she could also create an automation on her phone that turns on a virtual switch when arriving or departing a specific location (e.g., work). That could be used as-is on Hubitat, or you could use some combination presence/switch driver (or two devices plus a rule) to get an "is at work?" presence sensor device.

I once tried this with myself but stopped caring. The pandemic and remote work may have been part of that, but I think it was more that I didn't particularly care where I was, just whether I was home. :smiley: (And I was and still am using HomeKit/HomeBridge to supplement the Hubitat app's presence sensor; together, they're almost always reliable.)

That's always the best approach in my opinion. When you work around bad behavior, you just encourage more bad behavior.

Are you guys married (with children)?

Busy humans make mistakes and spouses don't always respond well to being "educated."

Alternatively, if I create an elegant solution that reminds her to plug in the EV so she doesn't have to move all her stuff to the ICE vehicle, stop on her way to get gas, etc. I'm a hero.

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