Development of mobile and desktop applications for a fingerprint-based attendance management system

Mobile application technology has been at the forefront of technological advancement in recent years. This has made life easier, and tasks that were considered herculean have been made easier and executable in a much shorter time than ever. One of such tasks is the process of taking attendance during events (such as lectures and conferences) by scribbling one’s signature and other personal details on a central register. This manual process is cumbersome and inconvenient, especially when a large number of participants are involved. To address this problem, this paper presents an automated solution in which a Java-based mobile application was developed and connected wirelessly to a central database that was created using My structured query language (MySQL) application whose task, among others, was to record attendance information. The database was connected to the backend of the web-based software program which was coded in hypertext pre-processor (PHP) programming language. Authentication was achieved through username, password, and fingerprint information. The system was deployedin a university to log students’ details, time absent, time present and cumulative attendances per month and it was realised that the system was highly effective, efficient and 5 times faster than the conventional paper-based attendance logging technique