Logitech’s peel-and-stick radar sensors could let companies invisibly monitor their offices
Logitech sales boomed during the pandemic as people outfitted their home offices, and it’s getting a piece of the hybrid workplace with teleconferencing gear too. But Logitech’s also got a little-known corporate office management solution that could soon expand beyond conference rooms — using a pebble-shaped person detection device called the Logitech Spot.
It’s a millimeter wave radar sensor you can peel and stick up anywhere, letting companies invisibly see whether people are in a room. The company claims it’ll last four years on a single D-cell shaped lithium battery, no wires required at all.
It’s not just a radar sensor; it also measures particulates, VOCs, CO2, temperature, pressure, and humidity, so your company can get a health score for any given room. But the first clear draw is for companies to know whether workers are actually using their office space, and which rooms get used, as they make decisions about downsizing those offices, issuing return-to-office mandates, or reconfiguring them for hybrid work.
“They’re thinking about real estate footprint, what’s the right strategy,” Logitech for Business head of product Henry Levak tells me.
Levak says the radar sensors aren’t particularly powerful, when I bring up the idea that similar sensors could be used for pretty invasive snooping (like monitoring employees’ heartrate and breathing). The Logitech Spot is “initially” just reporting home whether a room is occupied, or not, and doesn’t even know how many people are in that room, he says. Logitech may also make the raw sensor data available to companies, though.
He says the radar can see roughly five meters away, and maybe up to two feet left or right, and could theoretically know the general placement of people in a room, but that’s about it. For larger rooms, companies are already widely using cameras to detect and track employees, he says, but this could be useful for smaller spaces where “you don’t want to have a camera pointed at people to see if they’re in the room or not.”
Each device can report back wirelessly via a LoRaWAN hub, using similar low-power long-range wireless tech to Amazon’s Sidewalk but without the peer-to-peer part. They’ve got Bluetooth as well.
Today, Logitech is marketing the Spot most immediately as a way to help automate meeting room reservations, hooking into the company’s existing solutions like its Logitech View interactive wayfinding touchscreen maps and its meeting room touchscreen controllers, as well as an array of partner workplace management software including Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
But like presence sensors in the smarthome, Levak says they could also automate all sorts of things and generate all sorts of insights. Things as simple as extending your room reservation if people are still using the room, or fixing the bad air quality or energy efficiency in a particular location. Or things as fancy as detecting whether a particular person has entered a particular room and setting their preferred temperature. Levak says you can use multiple Spots for larger rooms to help monitor temperature differentials, too.
Logitech hasn’t announced a price for the Spot yet, so it’s definitely too early to say if it’d be affordable for non-corporate use in, say, a smart home, but it does nominally require Logitech’s cloud to work. Levak says “some crafty person” could theoretically create a cloud connector using Logitech’s API’s, though. The Spot is scheduled to ship in the second half of the year.
Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge
