Smart Attendance for Faculty Monitoring System Using the Bluetooth Low Energy: Design and Implementation

Student attendance serves many other important purposes aside from monitoring. In certain universities, the attendance of students in a course is also used as one of the requirements for students to be allowed to sit for the final examination. Traditionally, among most Malaysian Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), attendance recording is usually done using pen and paper, or uses simple web-based system that is time consuming and difficult for faculty periodic monitoring. To address the identified drawbacks, this research aims to develop a Smart Attendance for Faculty Monitoring System using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to assist faculty in recording, managing and monitoring students’ attendance and class schedules effectively. The system is developed for Android-based devices using an agile methodology consists of iteration and incremental approaches. Thus, to evaluate the effectiveness of the system, a survey was conducted on 140 respondents involving lecturers and students of Kolej Universiti Poly-Tech MARA (KUPTM). Respondents were selected using purposive sampling. The descriptive analysis showed that 87.9% of the respondents strongly agreed that the system is effective in assisting lecturers to record attendance, manage class schedules and student attendance as well as to assist faculty in monitoring students’ absenteeism.