Understand Desk Utilisation Without Tracking Users
Ronspot’s desk occupancy sensors give organisations a clear, accurate view of office desk utilisation, without collecting personal data or monitoring employees.
What Are Desk Sensors?
Desk occupancy sensors are small, unobtrusive, and passive devices placed under desks to detect whether a workspace is in use or available.
They work by detecting motion and converting that signal into a simple occupied or vacant status.
- Sensors detect occupancy through motion (e.g., chair movement and leg presence)
- Then they report a simple status: in use or free.
- Data is transmitted via secure IoT connectivity
- Ronspot aggregates utilisation data across desks and zones
- Dashboards reveal trends, gaps, and demand patterns
When connected to Ronspot, these signals become actionable insights that show how desks are actually being used across the office.
Benefits of Occupancy Sensors
Make smarter workspace decisions with real usage data
Desk Motion Sensors At a Glance
These sensors are designed for fast, low-impact rollouts in busy workplaces. They provide reliable utilisation insights while keeping privacy, security, and maintenance simple.
What Desk Sensors Do
What Desk Sensors Don’t Do
In partnership with
Why Desk Occupancy Sensors Matter
When you don’t have accurate utilisation data, it’s hard to know what’s really happening in the office. Decisions get made using assumptions, old reports, or booking data that doesn’t tell the full story. The result is often too many desks, wasted space, or hybrid policies that don’t match real office behaviour.
Desk occupancy sensors remove the guesswork. They show what’s actually happening. When desks are used, where demand is highest, and how usage changes over time. With this visibility, you can optimise layouts, match desk capacity to real demand, and support flexible work in a way that actually works.
Most importantly, occupancy sensors give you a long term foundation for workplace strategy. As attendance patterns shift and teams change, you can keep improving based on real data, while protecting trust with privacy first, people respecting technology.
Want better desk usage data?
Talk to our team about integrating passive sensors with Ronspot to get accurate usage insights and smarter space planning.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, desk occupancy sensors are designed to be privacy-first. They detect whether a desk is in use (occupied vs free) without collecting personal data, identities, or tracking individuals, helping you comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR.
Desk booking systems show who plans to use a desk, while desk occupancy sensors show what actually happens. Sensors capture real usage—highlighting no-shows, unused desks, and demand patterns that bookings alone can’t reveal. Together, they provide a complete view of desk utilisation.
Desk sensors can integrate with platforms like Ronspot via APIs, combining occupancy data with booking systems, access control, and analytics dashboards. This creates a unified view of space usage without requiring employees to change how they work.
Yes. By revealing underused desks and excess capacity, desk occupancy sensors support office space optimisation, helping organisations reduce wasted space, avoid unnecessary expansion, and make smarter long-term real estate decisions.
For hybrid offices, desk occupancy sensors commonly use Passive Infrared (PIR) motion detection. PIR sensors sense small changes in movement around an individual workstation to determine whether a desk is in use or free, without identifying the person.
Not always, some teams start with a smaller rollout to establish utilisation trends. However, in hot-desking or flexible seating environments, placing sensors on all desks delivers the most accurate insights into real-time availability and long-term usage.
No, desk occupancy sensors run automatically once installed. Simply sitting at a desk (or moving within range) triggers the motion sensor and updates the desk status to in use—no manual check-in required.
No, desk occupancy sensors measure utilisation, not attendance. Because sensors don’t identify individuals, they can’t link usage to a specific employee. Their purpose is to show whether a desk is occupied—not who is using it.
Desk motion sensors can detect motion at a distance of up to 5 metres, with a beam width of over 90/30 degrees, helping ensure workstation movement is captured reliably.
No, sensors connect via IoT networks, which are typically isolated from core corporate systems. This reduces risk because sensors don’t need access to your internal Wi-Fi credentials or business network, keeping deployment secure and IT-friendly. They also don’t transmit sensitive information, only a simple desk status signal: occupied or free.
Ronspot does not supply the physical hardware directly. However, we work closely with selected sensor partners and can provide the right contacts so you can source the sensors confidently.
Installation is typically quick and low-cost because the sensors are wire-free. Most customers self-install sensors under desks using strong double-sided tape, or use the mounting plate with screw fastening if preferred. If you’d like Ronspot or a partner to complete the installation, we can support that as a paid service (additional fees apply).
Very little. Sensors are battery-powered and designed for long-term deployments, with up to 10 years of battery life. That means minimal ongoing maintenance and fewer replacements.
Sensor pricing depends on the number of desks. For an estimate, contact us via the form, include how many desk sensors you need, and we’ll provide a tailored quote.
Need more answers?
Our team’s here to make things easier. Drop us a line or book a call and we’ll walk you through it.