A Smart Classroom Application: Monitoring and Reporting Attendance Automatically Using Smart Devices

Abstract

For recording attendance in a classroom, generally instructors collect signatures of the attendees. Then, at the end of the semester, those signatures need to be counted and reported. This process causes waste of time and effort for both instructors and attendees. Besides this process is very error prone. Moreover, in crowded classes, there could be some misuses of this process. In this study, a smart classroom application is proposed and developed in order to monitor the attendance of the students in a classroom environment. In the design, a low-energy Bluetooth device is located at each classroom. Identification number (ID) of the low-energy Bluetooth device and the name/number of the classroom that the device is located are matched and stored in a central database. In addition to this information, the name of the courses given in that classroom and their time tables are also stored in the central database. Thus, in the database, the weekly course schedule of the classrooms is available. In addition to this central database infrastructure, a mobile application is developed that can run on both in mobile phones and smart watches. The users first install the application on their own smart devices. Whenever an attendee enters to a classroom, the smart device and its application interacts with the low-energy Bluetooth device. The student’s identification number (Student ID: SID), the identification number (ID) of the low-energy Bluetooth device located at the class, the day and time of the interaction are sent to the central database by the smart device. Using this information, the name of the attendee and the courses that he/she attended are matched using the SID of the attendee, the ID of the low-energy Bluetooth device, the day and time of the interaction. Those matching information are also stored in the central database. The records in the central database are used to create any automatic reports, i.e. the attendance status, the time and duration of the attendance, and the classroom (course) of the record. The advantage of the proposed system is that it is a fully automatic system that records the presence of the students, generates automatic attendance reports, does not require any extra device except installing a mobile application onto smart phones or smart watches of the student, and can be deployed with a low budget. The proposed system is tested in real classroom environment and it is proven to be operational.