Space Occupancy

Combine sources, maintain history, and adapt occupancy data to your needs.

The Space Occupancy feature allows you to define what data a space should provide when queried about occupancy. This configuration determines how data from devices and other spaces is collected, transformed, and exposed as the authoritative occupancy data for the space. It ensures consistency over time, even as devices are replaced or reconfigured, and supports aggregation across the hierarchy of spaces in the building.

Use cases

Aggregation

Occupancy information for larger spaces can be derived from occupancy information in the spaces they contain.

History preservation

The history of occupancy data is directly tied to the space, not the physical devices providing the data. So devices can be added, removed and swapped while preserving the correct data history of the space.

Data transformation

The raw data provided by the physical devices can be transformed before being outputted as the occupancy data of the space. For example, presence data from overly sensitive motion detectors can be stabilized to prevent false detection of no presence when occupants are not moving.

Configuring occupancy

Configuring occupancy involves specifying which sensors should be the primary providers of occupancy data for a space. Their data will be combined and used as a unified source of occupancy data for the space that is continually updated as new data comes in from the sensors.

Whenever a service like bookings or insight reports needs to obtain occupancy data for this space, they will use the unified data source configured for the space.

You may change this configuration at any time, but any changes after the initial configuration will only apply to new data that comes in. All data for the space that has already been processed will persist unmodified until the configuration is completely removed. This means that you can add, remove and replace physical sensors without losing the data history of the space.

Where to configure occupancy

Every space has as associated page for viewing and managing it occupancy configuration.

To open the occupancy configuration page for a building:

Click the three dots on the right side of your building's tile in the Buildings list.
Select Configure occupancy.

To open the occupancy configuration page for a space on a floor:

Click the tile for your building in the Buildings list to enter the map view.
Select the desired floor from the drop-down menu in the toolbar.
Click the desired space on the floor map to show its info panel.
Click the three dots in the upper right of the info panel.
Select Configure occupancy.

You can also do this through the list view:

When in the map view, switch to the the list view in the toolbar.
Find your space on the list.
Click the three dots on the right side of the space list entry.
Select Configure occupancy.

You can also navigate to the configuration page of another space by clicking the link in the Occupancy column in the Spaces list on a configuration page.

To see which spaces have already been configured, use the filters in the toolbar:

Click the button for filtering on resource type (by default set to All) and select Areas.
Click the Insight filtering button that shows up and select Occupancy.

This restricts the map and list view to only show spaces with a completed occupancy configuration.

Regardless of filtering, spaces with configured occupancy will show an icon resembling a group of people in the tool-tip when hovering over the space in the map view and on the space's tile in the list view.

Occupancy providers

Both physical devices and other spaces can provide occupancy data for a space.

Consider the example of a floor containing multiple rooms, with a people counting device in an open common area. After configuring occupancy for all the rooms, you would select them as occupancy providers for the floor, since you would like the total people count for the floor to include the people in the rooms. The floor people count should also include the people in the common area, so you would select the common area device as an additional occupancy provider.

After selecting providers, you can adjust the specific types of occupancy data (presence, people count, and line crossing) each of them should provide if they can. For example, you probably don't want line crossing counts from the rooms on a floor to contribute to the line crossing count of the floor as a whole, but you probably do want to include line crossing counts from a door placed directly on the floor.

Occupancy data categories

Presence

When the presence category is enabled for a selected provider, the provider will supply any object presence and motion detection data it may have.

By default, presence is supplied by the following providers:

Devices
Desks
Rooms
Areas
Floors

A detection of presence in any of the presence-enabled providers will register as a presence in the space you're configuring.

People count

When the people count category is enabled for a selected provider, the provider will supply any people count data it may have.

By default, people count is supplied by the following providers:

Devices
Rooms
Floors

The people count in the configured space will be calculated as the sum of people counts in all people-count enabled spaces in the provider list plus the maximum people count among the people count-enabled devices in the list.

The rationale for this approach is that physical people count devices assigned directly to the space are assumed to cover the open areas of the space, so multiple such devices would count the same people. By taking the maximum count from these, we use the device with most coverage without double counting.

If the devices in reality cover non-overlapping regions of the space, you should define dedicated spaces for these regions and assign each device to its region. These spaces can then be selected as providers and their people counts will be summed instead of maxed.

Line crossing

When the line crossing category is enabled for a selected provider, the provider will supply any entry allowed/denied and people count in/out data it may have.

By default, line crossing is supplied by the following providers:

Devices
Doors
Floors

The crossing counts in the configured space will be calculated as the sum of crossing counts from all line crossing-enabled providers in the list.

Options

Start date

When creating a new configuration, you can use the Start date option specify the earliest date you want the occupancy data for the space to be available on.

If any of the selected occupancy providers have earlier data, this will not be included in the history of occupancy date for the configured space.

This option can not be changed for an existing configuration.

Lingering presence

It may sometimes be preferable to delay the reports of no presence from presence sensors in case they are caused by a person being still rather than having left the room. Use the Linger after no presence detected option to configure the duration of the delay.

This will be applied to presence data from all devices (not spaces) in the provider list.

Output preview

Use the output preview at the bottom of the configuration form to view the occupancy data that the configured space would provide with the above providers and settings.

Use the controls to view the data at different resolutions and for different time spans. The controls only affect the data preview, not the resulting occupancy configuration.

Updating an existing configuration

You can at any time change the providers and options in an existing configuration. But note that these changes will only affect future data. The data up until the time of reconfiguration will remain unchanged.

If you want to re-evaluate historical occupancy data with a new configuration, you must remove the existing configuration and create a new one. Note that this will delete all occupancy data acquired with the old configuration.