TouchIn: An NFC Supported Attendance System in a University Environment

 Abstract—Registering for attendance in education environments especially universities is a highly demanding activity as a result of increasing number of students. The attendance process normally involves circulating a paper for the students to register their names, or the lecturer calling the names and registering the students either in a paper or from PDA/PC. In the first case the students' attention may be attracted while taking the lectures and at the same time they can register for students who do not being present in the class. While in the latter case the issue of cheating in the form of registering for their friends can be solved but imaging the number of students to be from 50 and above, a great portion of the lecture time will be wasted performing this process. In this paper we propose a smart attendance system using NFC that will simplify the attendance process, by simply touching an attendance poster or the lecturer's NFC based mobile device in the class. The issue of attendance registration in present-day institutions is really posing a great challenge in academic setting, because of the way the process is done and various hurdles surrounding it. The attendance is an important part of students" academic record; since in some institutions without a certain percentage student cannot sit for an examination, while in some other institutions it is part of the continuous assessment. However, the traditional way of attendance registration is time consuming and prone to cheat by some students. The process involves the lecturer passing a paper to the students in a class to write their names and sign, or find their names in the paper to sign along their names. In this situation some students may deceive the lecturer by signing attendance for their friends who are not present in the class. Another way which is more difficult and time consuming is the lecturer will be calling names from the list of the students that are enrolled into the course, and mark present for each and every student who is in the class. Imagine how many minutes it will take to register attendance in a class of like 100 students in this fashion. These are some of the challenges that call for an improvement in the attendance registration process. Several technologies like Biometric, RFID, NFC, etc can be used to simplify and improve the attendance system, since user identification is the most important aspect that needs to be handled cautiously in this type of applications. In this work we propose a web based attendance system using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The NFC technology is now integrated into mobile devices which can be used for online payment, access control, user identification, transfer of personal and private information, etc. NFC is a new, short range, high frequency, low bandwidth, and wireless communication technology. NFC communication is activated by touching two NFC enabled devices together, or bringing them into close range. The range is usually few centimeters, and it operates at the frequency of 13.56 MHz. The maximum data transfer rate is 424kbit/s. NFC is based on Radio frequency Identification (RFID) thus its communication involves initiator and a target, the initiator actively generates a Radio Frequency (RF) field that can be used as a signal to power a passive target. The initiator (active) has its own internal power that can be used to power the ICs that generate the outgoing signal; while the target (passive) has only ICs with no internal power, which makes it to be in different forms like tags, stickers or cards (1). NFC support three modes of operation they are: reader/writer mode, card emulation mode, and peer to peer mode. The communication in reader/writer mode is between