The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has announced “Ambient Sensing” for Zigbee devices.
(Dutch readers can also check here
With a firmware upgrade, Zigbee devices (probably routers) can work together to create (human) presence detection.
That would be a nice addition for Zigbee/Homey users!
Let’s hope Zigbee device manufacturers and Athom are going to support it… 
A fun addition to this topic: we had the opportunity to meet the founder of nami at CES—the same visionary who previously founded WiZ. Nami is also a member of the CSA and played a role in developing this technology.
While nami itself leverages WiFi sensing, it operates in a somewhat similar way to the tech being discussed here.
In my opinion, the biggest challenge will be adoption. Will manufacturers embrace this technology, and at what scale? Personally, I believe it would take a major player like Signify integrating it into their Hue products for it to truly gain traction.
Still, it’s fascinating technology and definitely worth keeping an eye on!
Indeed, a nice addition, @Doekse. Thanks.
Besides the effort manufacturers have to put in to make this available, I suppose there is some work for Athom as well, to support it on Homey? Or for Homey app developers?
Can you elaborate on this a bit?
It might also gain attraction for Homey…
We had a very similar discussion with nami. In theory, we could enable this functionality for Homey, but if no one adopts it, all that effort would be in vain.
The first step, in my opinion, would be for a major manufacturer of end devices to start implementing this feature in their products. After all, a Homey hub is just one device within your home—it wouldn’t be effective if none of the end devices supported it.
Let’s be honest here: adoption by other brands has never been a major reason for Athom to improve its Zigbee implementation. Basic features like binding, grouping and OTA (yes I know, “technically possible”) are not supported, even though many users and developers has asked for it for years now. And since the LG Homey doesn’t support Zigbee at all, there’s even less reason to implement it.
I also think that would be the right approach @Doekse (after all, there’s still enough to be improved on Homey’s current Zigbee implementation… )
Would it only require effort from Athom to build it into Homey’s firmware, or do app developers have to build it into their Homey apps as well,?
In fact in does! The ThinQ ON does Zigbee, Thread and Matter
I’m not entirely sure about that, but my guess is that it would be something built directly into Homey. Essentially, Zigbee end devices would send packets directly to Homey, which would then analyze the interference on those links.
Interesting that I haven’t read that in any of the (official) press releases, including yours.
But if it does, perhaps Homey users can rejoice in hope that Zigbee might get some long-awaited improvements.
