Ask HN: Looking for advice how to detect if person is at desk | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Looking for advice how to detect if person is at desk

1 pointramtatatam6 comments

Hi, I'm trying to find the best product that I could use in my office to come up with idea how we utilize our desks.

Long story short - we rent desks within bigger open space. It's not really cheap so we would like to find out if we are not using our space as efficiently as we could. I know you could use simple solution like PiR sensors but if somebody is not moving for long enough period of time then PiR will not catch it.

I am wondering if you are using something in your office that helps you to establish if you need all desks you rent.

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If what your really care about is desk utilization, ask the people who use the desk to tell you.

If what you actually want to do, is track when people are at their desks, you are picking a poor metric if you think it correlates to productivity. Great idea for telling the employee that you don’t trust them though.

We do not assign desks to people, I think "hot desk" would better explain how we use them as our devs are free to work from home if they feel like it. In the same time there is a group of people who do like to come to the office. Also some people pop in early in the morning, leave their bag and check email only to spend rest of the day on meetings with customers.

I found this company: https://www.pointgrab.com/ and they seem to be good. The only possible problem is that they use camera, I am unsure how will this work with GDPR and also if people will accept the fact of camera pointed at them.

what about OpenCV/DLib and a basic face detector?

You can combine it with PIR eventually

Hey, thanks for suggestion :-) I know it will sound a bit lazy but I am looking for off-the-shelf product that would simply tell me what is the % of time our desks are used so we can reduce (or increase) their number.

I don't think it exists, but really it takes you less than 2 hours of code to figure out what to do, if you're already in C++ or Python. These Frameworks expose C++ and Python API

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