Designing an UHF RFID-Based Attendance System for School Stakeholders

Abstract

Attendance monitoring is an important administrative activity in educational institutions because it supports student discipline evaluation and academic supervision. However, traditional attendance methods, including manual recording, fingerprint systems, and RFID card-based attendance, still face several limitations such as data entry errors, time inefficiency, attendance fraud, forgotten cards, and the lack of real-time monitoring. This study proposes a conceptual attendance system that integrates Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Internet of Things (IoT) communication, real-time notifications, and human validation to improve attendance accuracy and reliability. The proposed system utilizes passive UHF RFID stickers attached to students’ smartphones, allowing automatic identification without requiring direct physical interaction. UHF RFID readers and antennas installed at school entrances and classrooms detect student presence within a maximum reading range of approximately five meters. Attendance data are transmitted through an IoT network to a centralized server for verification, storage, attendance evaluation, and notification delivery. To minimize proxy attendance and ensure that students are physically present in their scheduled classes, the system incorporates classroom-level validation and teacher-based verification. In addition, QR code attendance and mobile application-based manual attendance are provided as backup mechanisms when RFID detection fails. The proposed framework offers a practical, scalable, and cost-effective solution for improving attendance management in educational environments.