Attendance management for educational institutions is very important; it gives clear picture of students who regularly attend classes. Participating in academic activities such as lectures, laboratory experiments by students affects their academic performance. However, the conventional way of attendance registration is time consuming and prone to proxy attendance. 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. 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 smart attendance system using NFC that will simplify the attendance process, by simply touching a poster or the lecturer's NFC based mobile device in the class.
TopNfc Technology
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 within 10cm, and it operates at the frequency of 13.56 MHz. The data transfer rate is 106, 212, or 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 (Coskun, Ok, & Ozdenizci, 2011).
NFC support three modes of operation in order to exchange information between NFC devices/tags, they are: reader/writer mode, card emulation mode, and peer to peer mode. Reader/writer mode allows one way transmission of data between active and passive devices. In this case the active devices like smartphone either read data from or write to passive devices such as tags or stickers. Peer-to-peer mode on the other hand allows the exchange of information between two NFC-enabled devices. Here any of the devices can be active or passive depending on the operation. When a device is sending information it becomes active while when it is receiving then it changes to passive state. Card emulation mode allows the NFC device to act as a contactless card which can be read using NFC reader device (“Near Field Communication,” n.d.). This makes the NFC device to serve as a credit card, ticket, identification card, etc. One popular application of NFC is Smart Poster. The concept of Smart Poster is to keep information like URL, phone number, SMS into a tag and attached the tag to a physical object. This information can be accessed by touching the tag with NFC enabled device. (Smart Poster References) The Smart Poster has some actions that can initiate phone call, launch URL, or send SMS. In our proposed system two modes of operation will be used: Reader/writer mode (like smart poster) and Peer-to-Peer mode (like android beam). Another popular application of NFC is in financial transaction where it serves as a credit card. Other applications include reading and managing health care data, changing phone settings, access control, user identification, transfer of personal and private information, etc. NFC forum pictorially show some of the applications of NFC in Figure 1. NFC forum is a non-profit association formed by NXP Semiconductors, Sony and Nokia in 2004 that deal with developing NFC specifications, promoting implementation and creating awareness about NFC (NFC Forum, 2007)