An indispensable part of any educational institution is the
attendance management system, which, even in today’s world, is often manually maintained and only in certain places, electronic. In institutions that have classes with a strength of around 50 students, taking periodic attendance is not very time-consuming for teachers. But in classes that have 80-100 students, a big chunk of the teachers’ time is spent in organizing and taking attendance.
To ease the attendance management process for teachers, four students from Bengaluru’s
MVJ College of Engineering —
Gautam Hariharan, Narein Rao,
Akhilesh Sridhar and
Jason Manoj — have designed a Bluetooth-based attendance tracking system. Called BT Proxy, the app helps in registering students’ attendance and tracking their minimum requirements, which is usually a big cause of concern for students, especially in a country like ours.
So, how did the four come up with the idea for this project? Says Gautam, “The four of us were planning on attending a national-level innovation competition, and for that, we were brainstorming as to what we can do for our project. That is when Akhilesh and Jason came up with the idea of an attendance management system using a low-energy Bluetooth
module. The main goal of this project is to eliminate the time taken in recording attendance, and can be used in schools, colleges, office, etc.”
The app, he says, works on the University Student Number (
USN) of each student. “Low-energy
Bluetooth modules, are really tiny when compared to regular Bluetooth modules, and can be implanted inside the ID card of the student. These also consume very less power. Each module can be powered up by a button battery and can last up to a year. These modules will be given a unique ID, which can only be set or reset by an administrator," he adds.
Every class will have an atmega32 module, HC05, IDs implanted with Bluetooth-modules and a WiFi module. An Real-Time Clock module will keep track of the time. Class periods, break and the like can be pre-set as required. “Once a class starts, the module automatically scans for all Bluetooth IDs and passes on the data to either an attendance monitoring app or sends it to the cloud. The IDs have a unique code and will not interfere with each other,” says Gautam.
