Design of a Near Field Communication-Enabled Points Collection Application System

Abstract

Nowadays, users collect points by stickers after they purchase products. However, to issue stickers and to exchange points are inconvenient to store staffs and users. In addition, the traditional way for points collection increases the business cost because of additional cards and stickers. In this paper, we propose a novel, practical and integrated application system to resolve above issues namely NFC-enabled Point Collection Application System (NPCAS). NPCAS mainly consists of three subsystems including user-side APP, store-side APP and backend management system. The user-side APP let users to quickly complete points management, for instance, they can accumulate points by communicating with the store-side APP through Near Field Communication (NFC) technique. The store-side APP calculates the points of each transaction and updates them to the backend management system. Then, the users can inquire their current points, exchange details, exchangeable commodities and so on. Android operating system is the mainstream on smart phones so that the Android-based APPs attract a lot of attention. Accordingly, we develop both APPs based on Java, XML, Android Software Development Kit (SDK) and Android Studio. The backend management system is built by Apache server, PHP module, PHP files and MySQL database. The format that we used on information exchange between backend management system and both APPs is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). In a word, NPCAS greatly simplifies the procedures of points collection and management.