Use User’s Geo Location for Smart Control

There are some products on the market of smart thermostats/controllers that rely on knowing the user Geo Location to act “smart” – is this really smart?

When user is at given location there are several methods to figure it out:

Active:

• Pinging an IP address presence
• Checking current WiFi network name
• Using arping to check mac address presence

Passive:

• Listening for specific packets

All above are good if you do not need an extra time to react and that’s the problem. You can shutdown all the lights when no one is present.

But starting the heating when someone becomes  present  is already  late, how to anticipate this?

For heating there are two routes:

• The easy one – share user’s phone location and use a geofence to determine heating start
• The hard one – learn people schedules /if there is a schedule, google now still can’t figure out mine after 2 years/

I guess will take the easy one on this.

Any ideas? Please, comment.