Mobile Attendance Recording System using IoT to aid in Social Distancing

Abstract

The recording of attendance is an essential part of many employees' daily work process. This is not limited to the workplace and extends to academic institutions such as schools and universities. Recording attendance at the workplace has become automated in many industries using a range of biometric technologies. A key part of these methods is that there is a high amount of human contact involved ranging from the sharing of scanners to queuing and/or crowding at key entrances and exits. This is a problem in a viral pandemic where airborne and surface to person transmission is possible. Due to the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, many places have stopped using these biometric attendance technologies and a few have reverted to use other methods like pen and paper. This is a partial solution as they still involve crowding and the unnecessary sharing of surfaces. Using the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the IBM cloud, an android app has been created to help solve this problem so users can use their personal mobile devices in place of existing biometric technology. The proposed solution system uses existing mobile phone technology to run an application that will enable users to record their attendance via Wi-Fi without the need to queue or share surfaces. Being able to utilize mobile devices already owned by the users makes this a cheap and easy system to implement to achieve the goal of accurate attendance recording. The results obtained show the system gives high accuracy in recording the attendance while minimizing human contact with others in the working place with low cost, and less complexity.