Privacy-Preserving Zero-effort Class Attendance Tracking System

Student attendance tracking is a vital process in education. This process can be tiring and time-consuming. We believe it is possible to automate it using technologies available in the educational infrastructure and user smartphones. Today smartphones can sense several types of signals over the air using radio frequency technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular signals, etc.). Furthermore, smartphones receive broadcast messages from transmitting entities and can measure the received signal strength. We believe that these signals can be utilized in the context of classroom attendance tracking, primarily because they can indicate the location of a user's device. The proposed system aims to have student smartphones in the classroom generate “location proofs” based on the radio frequency fingerprints scanned by their devices, which are later used to verify their locations. In this paper, we propose the utilization of Wi-Fi access points in buildings on school campuses in conjunction with the instructor and student smartphones to build a zero-effort and privacy-preserving attendance tracking system. Our system is unique as it does not require any effort from users in the system. Moreover, it is privacy-preserving, as the App server has no information about user identities nor class locations.