Absence Early Warning System

Summary

Absence Early Warning System (AEWS) is a complete system designed to track and

detect students’ absence from schools and subsequently inform the next of kin , via SMS

and automated phone calls, of the absence as early as possible. The system was built with

the primary goal of increasing pupils safety following multiple recent unfortunate

incidents ,some of which were deadly, where children were forgotten locked in school

buses for hours.

However, children could miss going to school for many other reasons, and certainly is not

limited to being left behind in buses. Regardless of the reason, the school owes parents, or

next of kin, a notification as soon as their child fails to attend. Promptly doing so could

initiate an early search that could save lives. In such cases, AEWS helps schools to notify

next of kin in an efficient, consistent and effective manner.

System Components

Main Control Unit

Communication Terminal

Rugged Wireless Scanner

Portable offline scanner

Barcode printer with auto-cutter

Absence Early Warning System

How does it work?

The process consists of two simple steps:

Step 1 : Efficiently registering attendees.

Step 2 : At a pre-scheduled time, the system will initiate SMS and phone calls to next of

kin for absentees.

Step 1: Registering Attendance

The system supports three registration methods to ensure flexibility, feasibility and

practicality. These are as follows:

A. Direct Registration Method

This method works by scanning unique barcodes ,issued and printed directly from the

system, as students enter the school’s main gate. The tag could be attached to an id card, a

student bag, books, or any combination thereof.

Direct registration

in the main system Fast barcode scan Main entrance

Absence Early Warning System

B. Registration using portable scanners.

This method works best in the case of multiple school entrances, where it is not possible

to create a single registration point, or doing so would create a slow bottleneck in the

registration process. In this method, one or more offline portable scanner is used for each

entrance and the scanned barcodes are stored in devices’ internal memory in batch mode.

Each device is then attached to the main unit, which in turn downloads the registration

data in the main system.

Note: The student can be registered by name in case the tag is forgotten.

Multiple

entrances Reading barcodes using

portable scanners

Later

Syncing each device

with the main system

Entrance 1

Entrance 2

Entrance 3

Absence Early Warning System

C. Registration using attendance sheets.

This method of registration does not need students’ individual barcode tags. Instead, it

relies on attendance sheets with specific barcodes printed from the system. A staff

member would manually note the absence using these papers, before scanning the sheets

in one batch mode on class-by-class basis.

Step 2: System Notifications

On a pre-scheduled daily time ,which can be set in the settings, the system will produce a

list of all absent students ,those with no attendance registration, and inform the school

management of summary statistics of the total absence level, student list, expected total

number of phone calls, all before the start of the notification process. At this point, the

school management can interfere and pause the communication process if needed.

Otherwise, the system will start notifying next of kin via SMS and phone calls in the set

time.

Note: It is possible to mark some students with an “expected absence” status for certain

dates in advance. In this case, no phone calls or SMS will be initiated to the student’s

next of kin in these dates.

Staff member notes the absence

list using attendance sheets

printed from the system.

Quickly scanning absence

using barcodes in the sheets

Later Class 1

Class 2

Class 3

Absence Early Warning System

Unique Features

• High quality components with custom software designed for reliability.

• For increased reliability, the system does not need an internet connection to function.

All SMS and phone calls’ notifications are performed using SIM cards installed in the

system.

• The system does not initiate SMS or phone calls if the absence level is too high (e.g. in

case of bad weather or unusual conditions). In this case, the system alerts the school

management of the status of “high absence level”. The school management has the

option of overriding this setting and initiating the notification process using one click.

• Touch-based ,easy-to-use and friendly user interface.

• Support for multiple contact numbers per student.

• The system keeps detailed log of all notifications sent to the next of kin.

• Ease of student data management.

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