Utilizing beacon technology for the development of a smart attendance system

Abstract

Tracking students’ attendance is part of academic cycles, however, academic staff members become overwhelmed by applying traditional methods for recording this. The dominant method of recording attendance is traditional methods such as calling students’ names and passing attendance sheets. These methods raise some concerns such as being time-consuming, spreading Coronavirus by sharing the attendance sheet, and other issues. The introduced and implemented solutions in the literature are rather expensive, time-consuming, lack accuracy, or require a long process to record the attendance. In this project, we aim to investigate the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons at the main campus of Tabuk University to build a smart attendance system called the UTSA system. This system will help to overcome the raised concerns of applying the traditional methods for recording student attendance. Three interactive HTML prototypes were developed and examined using a heuristic evaluation methodology. The third proposed prototype, the instructor web-based system, was the most pleasing prototype by most evaluators compared to the two prototypes of the mobile app. All of the evaluators agreed that the current attendance system at Tabuk University is time-consuming and vulnerable to human errors during the transference of attendees from the attendance sheets to the online attendance system. The proposed system of this work provides an accurate and affordable method for signing in the students' attendance as it is going to be done using two steps for recording the attendance: Students mobile attendance broadcasting and academic staff verification process using the proposed app. Moreover, no additional equipment needs to be installed to apply the proposed solution as it used the students and the academic staff members mobile phones.