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Sensorless Occupancy Monitoring: The Hardware-Free Solution to Occupancy Analytics

Space utilization sensors are the gold standard for occupancy monitoring. You can’t analyze and optimize your workplace without visibility into how it’s being used, and the growing selection of sensors on the market make it possible to monitor every space over time with the greatest precision.

But depending on the type of sensors you choose, you could be stuck spending significant time and resources to install and maintain dozens, or even hundreds of pieces of hardware in a single location. Want to monitor individual workstations? They’ll each likely need a desk sensor. And to top it off, you need an occupancy analytics platform to bring all that data together in ways you can actually use. It more than pays off by providing you the insights needed to downsize and optimize your real estate portfolio, but the up front expense and ongoing disruption is too much of a barrier for some organizations.

Unfortunately, most alternative methods for collecting space utilization data are so vastly inferior to sensors that they’re not really useful for occupancy analytics. Badge scanners can easily miss when employees enter or exit the building (especially when they come and go in groups), and unless you have badge scans at various checkpoints throughout the office, you have no way of knowing what space people are occupying. Manual walkthroughs are more precise, but even if you perform them at consistent intervals all throughout the day, you only get a snapshot of your space utilization at those specific moments in time (not to mention the fact that they’re manual: someone’s always going to have to collect and record this data in a consistent manner—across each of your locations). And of course, data from reservation tools only tracks the use of shared, reservable spaces.

You don’t want to make critical and lasting real estate decisions based on incomplete or misleading information. But thankfully, there’s another option that provides the whole-facility data you need to perform occupancy analytics, without the hassle or cost of installing and maintaining new hardware: sensorless occupancy monitoring.

What is sensorless occupancy monitoring?

Sensorless occupancy monitoring uses your facility’s internal network to detect the presence of occupants and estimate their location. As people enter your office, their devices connect to your network, and they appear in your sensorless occupancy monitoring system as an occupant. The system triangulates their position as they move through your space, so you don’t just learn how many people enter—you learn how they interact with your space.

This can be used to supplement space utilization sensors and other occupancy data, or as an alternative holistic solution. More advanced sensorless occupancy monitoring solutions like Tango Occupancy will automatically anonymize this data to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR, and run deduplication algorithms to ensure that if a single person connects to your network with multiple devices, it only registers as one occupant in your system.

How does sensorless occupancy monitoring work?

Some sensorless occupancy monitoring solutions require API integrations with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to track connectivity. Tango Occupancy, however, simply uses your existing network infrastructure. When someone connects to one of your WiFi access points, a Wireless Local Area Network (W-LAN) controller manages that connection. Tango Occupancy uses a gateway to pull this data from the WLAN controller and send it to the aggregation engine. Based on the user’s triangulated position, they will count towards occupancy metrics for a specific zone, floor and building.

Every five minutes, Tango Occupancy pings the W-LAN controller to take a “snapshot” of your occupancy. Since WiFi connectivity is less precise than sensors, Tango Occupancy divides your office into zones and shows the presence of occupants in each zone.

But not all occupants connect to your network via WiFi. When someone connects via ethernet, the W-LAN won’t “see” them. Instead, Tango Occupancy maps every ethernet port to the specific workstation where someone would connect to it. So when the port is in use, the workstation appears as “occupied” in your dashboard.

Together, these two processes give you a high-level understanding of how your facilities are being used. And thanks to its simple implementation process, Tango Occupancy is easy to roll out at scale, too, giving you visibility into your entire real estate portfolio with a single solution.

How do you implement sensorless occupancy monitoring?

Unlike a sensor-based solution, Tango Occupancy requires no additional hardware. You don’t have to wait for us to physically visit each of your offices to install equipment on-site. Everything you need is in your facility and in the cloud. We just enable the connection, and you’re good to go.

With some sensorless solutions, you have to standardize your WiFi equipment across your portfolio, or it won’t work in some locations. That’s not the case with Tango Occupancy. The ISP you use doesn’t matter, so long as you have a W-LAN controller for our gateway to communicate with.

During the implementation stage, we also take inventory of every ethernet port and map it to specific workstations, so every port shows up in its proper place in the system.

Enable sensorless occupancy monitoring with Tango

Tango Occupancy is a robust occupancy analytics solution that’s fully compatible with any space utilization sensors you have or plan to have in the future. But it also comes with an advanced sensorless monitoring capability you won’t find anywhere else. Whether you already use sensors and want to supplement them, or you simply want a scalable occupancy monitoring system, Tango Occupancy vastly improves your visibility into occupancy data with convenient, comprehensive dashboards and sophisticated analytics.

Want to see what Tango Occupancy can do for you?

Request a demo today.