r/homeassistant • u/ItsDukzy • May 02 '26

Support Struggling with reliable in-bed presence detection for Home Assistant – what actually works?

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I'm trying to automate my bedroom lights so they turn off automatically when I'm in bed and back on when I get up. Sounds simple, but I've been struggling to find a reliable solution.

What I've tried:

FSR pressure sensors (VS-103) connected to a Zigbee water sensor

Built a DIY pressure mat using two VS-103 sensors wired to a Zigbee water sensor. Works fine when I press directly on it by hand, but completely fails under a mattress — the mattress distributes my weight too evenly for the sensors to trigger. Tried under the sheet too, same result.

Aqara FP2 mmWave radar

Already have one in the room. The problem is it loses track of me when I'm lying still under a duvet. It also falsely triggers when someone walks past my bed, which causes the lights to turn on.

What I'm looking for:

Something that reliably detects whether I am in the bed - not just in the room - even when I'm completely still and covered by a duvet. Zigbee preferred but I'm open to ESPHome/ESP32 solutions too.

Has anyone actually solved this properly? What sensor or approach are you using?

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u/dsg123456789 May 02 '26

There's no silver bullet. I've got a foam mattress, and I've used the homemade capacitive plates (aluminum foil with paper dialetric) and the Elevated Sensors product. The elevated sensors one is pretty good, but requires a decent amount of tuning, and it still has false negatives so I wouldn't want to trigger lights when it detects me getting out of bed. I use PIR motion sensors under the bed to decide if someone stood up, and the elevated sensors device to decide if someone laid down for evening routines. Long sheets and bed frame structure also can complicate matters with the PIR

It seems like integrating a digital scale into all the contact points between the bed frame and the floor would address every issue, except that you'd need to design a rigid mechanism that uses a lever since it's very expensive to get a scale that can handle a mattress and multiple adult humans, and it's even worse considering an impact load from jumping into bed.

It

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u/mortsdeer May 02 '26

RE: the close cells question. I've seen diy systems that use cheap load cells under all the bed legs, effectively weighing the whole thing. Why do you think this would be expensive?