Radio frequency identification (RFID) and database- based attendance management system

Abstract

Effective record and management of students and staff attendance of academic and non academic activities/events are vital for the smooth functioning of the educational system. This is still a difficult task in most institutions, particularly in Nigeria with a large number of staff and students attending different academic and non-academic functions. This is even more difficult to manage when the traditional method of paper and pen is used to record attendance, prone to errors, and in most cases lack integrity due to manual handling of the record. Electronics and Information Communications Technologies (ICT) can be deployed to help mitigate these problems and improve reliability, ease, speed, efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity of recording and managing attendance. In this work, we used Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and database management to provide an alternative solution that addresses issues of objects (humans and non-humans) authentication, authorization, and record management with high accuracy, reliability, and integrity using RFID-Arduino technology. The system works by reading staff’s and/or student’s details stored in a unique RF tag wirelessly through theRF reader and then matched and stored the record in the system’s database. Attendancemarking was achieved by matching the scanned ID with the database record. The system was successfully implemented and tested with 10 students and staff participants with the feature of exporting the records into excel format for statistical analysis and performance evaluation.