Internet of things-based smart classroom environment

The management of classrooms, halls, offices, and public spaces and the efficient use of these resources in any organization are challenging problems. With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), the management of these resources can be automated. Methods to automatically record activities and monitor resource usage inside classrooms in real-time are usually intricate. Previously we implemented a proof-of-concept phase of the smart chair system [1], consisting of one chair, to solve the problem of resource and classroom management at small scale. In this abstract we propose a complete system consisting of ten smart chairs, by employing IoT paradigm in order to simplify classroom management, attendance tracking and classroom interaction. Taking students attendance-monitoring systems as a motivational example, instructors have to call the names of students or the students are asked to sign the attendance sheet. The former is a time consuming process, while the latter is unreliable. The proposed smart classroom system simplifies many of these tasks by utilizing indoor localization, RFID sensors, pressure sensors, Arduino microcontrollers and cloud backend. The smart chair system can automatically check whether the chair is occupied or not by using multiple sensing technologies. Moreover, student identification can be automatically performed using RFID sensors, which can read RFID tags off student identification cards. Additionally, the tardiness or leave-early information can be analyzed by exploiting the integrated timestamps. The proposed smart classroom system will identify each student, record timestamp of arrival and departure, and will generate a dynamic seat map of students in the classroom by utilizing indoor localization.