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In recent years, the development of different technologies has opened new possibilities for
different activities to be accomplished easily in a smooth way. The rapid development in
mobile phone technologies especially mobile phone based information system has
contributed much in facilitating automation of activities in different sectors like Education,
Agriculture, Health, etc. Mobile phone technology has continued to evolve in terms of
computation power, speed, memory capacity and screen size. Many mobile applications for
different activities especially on the Android platform as the free software are being
developed.
Another technology which has shown tremendous development and application in the recent
years is the Radio Frequency Identification. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the
wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the purposes of automatically
identifying and tracking tags attached to objects(wikipedia). It has been around for many
decades but now days it is becoming the more relied technology in the area of tracking
objects due to its low cost and accuracy as compared to other auto-ID technologies like
biometric systems and barcodes. The most interesting and widely used applications of RFID
include those for supply chain management, security, and the tracking of important objects
and personnel(Weinstein, 2005).
Based on the suitability, development and applicability of both RFID and mobile phone
technologies, this research analyze and develop the low cost RFID and mobile application
based attendance management system which is proposed to be used in ordinary level schools
to efficiently manage student attendances. The system is proposed and designed in
consideration of financial capacity and environmental challenges of educational institutions
especially ordinary level schools in Tanzania.
Currently, the attendance management of both students and employees is being done
manually using attendance registers. Employees’ signs the attendance register book in the
morning using attendance register books where for students, the responsible personnel call a
roll call every day using attendance register books. Manual way of taking students and
employees’ attendance using attendance registers and class journals is inefficient, time
consuming and error prone. This system aims to replace the manual paper based system. |
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