Student Attendance Management System with Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon

Student Attendance Management System with Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon

INTRODUCTION 

The student’s ID card with a built-in IC chip has beenused for identifying the student electronically for variouspurposes including registration of attendance in the class-room. In Ibaraki University, for example, a software productnamedIC card de syussekichosa[1] has been prepared totake attendance by a PC connected to a card reader. Byscanning the student’s ID card over the reader, the student’sinformation is registered into a file in the PC so that heis marked present. The problem with this system is that itconsumes much time as each student has to do the samestep over and over again until all the students are registered.We can reduce the time for attendance registration ifwe use multiple devices in parallel to take attendance ofstudents. Code Shoppy It is our idea to use the students own smartphonesof which majority has the Android operating system. Inorder not to allow students to send attendance from outsidethe classroom, we employ a beacon device compliant withthe bluetooth low energy specifications (referred to as BLEbeacon) to transmit a magic number to the Android deviceswithin the classroom. Requesting the magic number to besent together with the student ID, we can let only thestudents in the classroom to send registration and can detercheating students.

RELATED SYSTEMS 

A. IC Card de syussekichosaThis is an attendance registration software product [1]developed by the Center for Information Technology inIbaraki University that runs on the Microsoft Windowsopearting system. Each of the students scans his ID cardover the PaSoRi card reader to pass the student’s ID andname from the built-in IC chip inside the card to the PC.The software writes the ID and name into a text file. Asmentioned before, this method takes much time to finishregistering all the students since each student has to come tothe reader and scan the card sequentially one after another.There is always a long queue of waiting students in thebeginning or at the end of each class.

B. Open implementation of FCF campus-card reader forattendance checking and integration with LMSThis system was developed by Nagai et al. [2] and runson Android devices. Basically it is the same as the PC-basedsystem in the previous subsection except that the Androiddevice is employed instead of PC. As each student scans theID card over the reader, a CSV file is created automaticallyto record the student’s ID and name with a time stamp.The compact Android device made it possible to pass itamong the students during the class. That saves the timefor registration and leaves much time to the lecture. But thestudents are disturbed by the device going around and theprocess of scanning so that they lose their concentration onthe lecture.

C. Attendance management system with NFC(Near FieldCommunication) on NexusThis system was developed by Ichimura et al. [3] andruns also on the Android devices. Before using this systemthe teacher prepares a CSV file containing the students’ ID,name and e-mail address registered to the class. Besides,each student ID is related to the digital image file of thestudent’s portrait printed on the ID card. As the student scansthe card over the NFC reader, attendance is registered in theCSV file and the portrait is displayed. That is an advanced system but still suffers from the same problems mentionedin the previous examples.

D. Attendance management web systemThis system is developed by Nippon Systems Develop-ment [4]. Attendance of the students is stored in the centralserver after the students scan their IC cards over the cardreader. The teacher can check the attendance record later onthe web-based attendance management system. The time tofinish registration is still long.