Design and Testing of Mobile-Phone-Detectors

Students use mobile-phones to store lecture-materials, e-books, tutorials, videos, communicate with their classmates and browse the internet for exceedingly-different-intentions. These projected-advantages, however, would have potential-undesirable-effects if mobile-phones are utilized in restricted-premises, such as exam-venues. Noncompliant- students (to general University exam-regulations) do use mobile-phones to cheat in exams. The rapid-explosion of cell-phones at the beginning of the 21st Century eventually raised problems, such as their potential-use to invade privacy or contribute to widespread academic-cheating. In this paper, two  systems, that will be used, independently, to detect mobile-phones in the exam-venues, were proposed: a mobile-detector with a range of 1.0m, using resistor-capacitor-circuit, which can detect both the incoming and outgoing-calls, as well as video-transmission and text messages, even if a mobile-phone is kept at the silent mode; and a Reed-switch-circuit-scanner, which, responds to an applied-magnetic-field and, can be used to detect mobile-phones that are switched-off or put on flight-mode, and thus, it can be used to scan students (without physical-inspection) on their entering examination-rooms. Overall, the results of this-concise-study are rather-positive, providing a good-starting-point for advanced investigations and improvements of the same. Several future-research-areas were also proposed by the study. Keywords: mobile, phone, students, detector, cheating.