Development of an Online Biometric-enabled Class Attendance Register System

This study presents an automated Online Biometric-enabled Class Attendance Register System (OBCARS) prototype. The system design and development is aimed at addressing the challenges of misplaced and/or torn attendance register paper sheets in various classrooms in Higher Educational Institutions. Also, the system is aimed at providing an efficient and effective class attendance tracking method that prevents attendance marking impersonation among students, and eases students' attendance record computation. The system adopted the use of biometric fingerprint reader for an individual student to input his/her attendance record for lectures attended in the system's back-end database. The system was tested with 50 students in the Department of Computer Science, University of Fort Hare Alice, South Africa for usability and fingerprint recognition accuracy. The test result indicated 97% accuracy at system level. The average execution time for student attendance tracking is 8.7 seconds against 22.6 seconds using paper attendance.