Installing Presence Detection in Home Assistant

If you want Home Assistant to know whether you are home, you are going to need at least one presence detection integration. Which integration you use is going to be based on your use case. Do you need to know which room people are in, or do you need to just know they are someone near. Or do you want to your house to know your exact location on earth.

I recently published a video on YouTube that walked through how I use Presence Detection, or more specifically how Home Assistant knows if my family is home. In that video I didn’t cover how to install Presence Detection, so this is a follow up to that.

Now, there are lots of different ways to do presence detection in Home Assistant. And you can get more or less complicated than mine. In fact, Home Assistant ships with quite a few built-in integrations for presence detection that can handle almost any use case. And you can combine them like me to give you even more information to ensure that Home Assistant really knows where people are.

The four integrations I use are:

• Home Assistant iOS App
• Life360
• Apple icloud
• Waze
  

Each provide various levels of location data. So I did a video that walks through setting those four up, and what kind of data is available with them.

If you want to see how I use them, check out How I Set Up Presence Detection in Home Assistant

Until Next time, Automate the Boring Stuff.