I am interested in detecting when a user is actually sitting down in a chair in front of a computer. The presence of the user affects many scheduling and user notification decisions that need to be made and as such, the data obtained about the user would need to be readable by a scripting engine.
What I am looking for:
- Better to accidentally presume the user is in his chair when he is not. If the method of detection is not accurate, it must err on the side of the user being in the chair when he/she is not.
- Identifying whether the person sitting in the chair in front of the computer is indeed the user that is logged in. This needs to happen without the user explicitly authenticating/identifying. As such, it will not be used for security or privacy related features as it may fail at times.
- A method of broadcasting what chairs are being occupied (and by whom) to other members of an intranet. A way of managing inventory, tying chairs to computers would be ideal.
- Mac, Linux and Windows support for the solution :)
Some possible methods that COULD exist out there in the world (but in practice, are not easy to configure and set up):
- Monitor inputs with short timeout period. When timeout is reached, broadcast empty chair message.
- Add a sitting weight test to the chair which transmits the result to the workstation. If the weight is within a 5lb range of the user's known weight, it presumes the correct user is sitting in front of the machine.
- Add motion camera support. Photograph an empty workstation scenario and compare the current image capture to that of the empty, testing the delta with a known threshold.
Update: This is not for employer/employee tracking. It is to allow a user to take part of their workstation user interface with them on their smartphones or portable devices when they leave their desks. Determining where the user is at a given time allows the updates to be sent to the proper device. Consider it an optimization of the signal to noise ratio of notifications. The goal is to avoid sending the notifications to unmanned desktops/the wrong user.