Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objectives: Faculty attendance in schools are monitored based on Daily Time Record (DTR) which captures a daily time-in and time-out of teachers in and out of the school campus using various technologies and methods, however there is a scarcity of studies in monitoring faculty attendance in the actual bounds of the classroom. Hence, this study aimed to develop an In-Classroom Faculty Attendance Monitoring System based on Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) with captured image cross-verification mechanism. Methods: The system comprises two modules, namely the Teacher Attendance Module and Attendance Monitoring Web Application module. The Teacher Attendance Module, it is composed of a UHF-RFID reader and a camera module that is interfaced to the Raspberry Pi board. Passive tags are embedded on the teachers’ ID cards for them to be uniquely identified by the UHF-RFID reader when they are within the 2- meter read distance. Meanwhile, the Attendance Monitoring Web Application module is developed using a PHP framework connected to a MySQL database. It aggregates the attendance data collected from the Teacher Attendance Module for monitoring purposes which is accessible to both the monitoring staff and teachers via a web browser. Findings: Based on the evaluation results, the proposed system received positive feedback from the end users in terms of its functionality and usability and was found to be more favorable over existing attendance monitoring systems. Novelty: The system provides a non-obtrusive way of checking teachers’ attendance by utilizing the UHF-RFID technology which has a longer read range than other RFID categories used in previous studies. Moreover, unlike existing solutions, the system checks for attendance multiple times, not only during entrance and exit which then calculates thetotal stay-in time of the teacher during a class session. Most importantly, the system can prevent fraudulent activities through a camera module.

Keywords: UHFRFID; Attendance; Faculty; Raspberry Pi; Camera