The traditional way of personnel clock-in is to use fingerprints. By registering personal fingerprints in advance, press the fingerprints on the fingerprint attendance machine to confirm the punch-in of personnel on duty. However, the fingerprint attendance machine has the problems of low efficiency, high cleanliness requirement of fingerprints, and the possibility of punch-in failure.

Especially at the special moment when the novel coronavirus is raging, people should try to minimize contact between people, and extra attention should be paid to disinfection and avoiding cross-infection of items that are in public touch. For office workers, they need to touch the fingerprint attendance machine during on and off duty. It is difficult to avoid the potential risk of cross-infection. After all, at workplaces, the one who comes into contact with the most people every day, except for door handles, is the fingerprint attendance machine.

So, how to realize the attendance of employees in this special period? In the face of complex personnel contact, the best way to avoid cross-infection is contactless clock-in.

At this time, Beacon attendance punch-in has become a good alternative.

RF-star launched the smart Beacon work attendance solution, using a contactless attendance system to help employees complete punch-in through mobile phones and assist companies to avoid the risk of cross-infection.

As long as the mobile phone turns on Bluetooth and the personnel pass by the work attendance device, the personnel identification and his attendance can be realized. Help company managers get rid of various inefficient attendance management methods such as fingerprint attendance, USB flash disk copying attendance data and signature attendance confirmation.

The Bluetooth Attendance solution is based on Beacon technology. Broadcast Beacon signals regularly through the Beacon product RF-B-AR1, RF-B-AR4. The punch-in location binding information is carried in MAC address, UUID, Major, Minor and others in the broadcast packets. The personnel uses a mobile phone with Bluetooth enabled to search for the Beacon signal in the air to confirm the punch-in attendance and location.

In the Beacon work attendance system, walk into the office area, directly take out the mobile phone, open the APP and punch in finished. No need to punch in on the attendance machine with fingerprints.

The Beacon work attendance solution is flexible and convenient, but it also faces the risk of being cheated to punch in. Here come questions. Can Beacon punch-in solve the problem of entrusted attendance? How to confirm that the employee has arrived at the office?

Can Beacon punch-in solve the problem of entrusted attendance?

There are many APPs and tools for cheating on attendance on the Internet. Roughly the following methods:

1. Location simulation, cracked by GPS and baseband module

2. Wi-Fi simulation

3. Root or jailbreak the phone

4. Customize the mobile phone, crack from the hardware

In addition to the latter two cheating methods, location simulation and Wi-Fi simulation are more common.

To avoid punch-in cheating, the mechanism is based on the confidentiality of location information:

a) Bind the mobile phone that punches in

After an employee successfully logs in and punches in for the first time, the attendance system binds the user account to the login device. When the device is used to log in to other accounts, the attendance system will automatically remind "This is not your phone".

b) Device or SIM card update reminder

When an employee logs in for the first time after changing a new mobile phone or a new SIM card, the attendance punch-in APP will automatically recognize the new device or new SIM card, and automatically trigger an information update application process, which can continue to be used after being approved by the supervisor.

c) Beacon broadcast encryption

The Beacon attendance punch-in system is based on the MAC address, UUID, Major, Minor and other information in the broadcast data. If a cheater uses the Sniffer tool to analyze and imitate the broadcast packet, the above two methods of preventing cheating will be completely invalid. If the Beacon broadcast data can be encrypted, then it will not be possible to simulate the cheating attendance punch-in system.

The Bluetooth Beacon RF-B-AR1 and RF-B-AR4 support encryption of broadcast data, and the broadcast data is encrypted through Beaconsetting or RF-star Beacon APPs. In this way, it is impossible of cheating by simulating Beacon data.

How to confirm that the employees go to the office?

At present, there are various APPs and WeChat applets of the mobile attendance punch-in solution on the market, and those need to improve one thing: collecting accurate and objective attendance data.

The mobile attendance system launched by RF-star does not use the mainstream LBS movement track positioning technology on the market to record the employee punch-in location. Because the LBS positioning accuracy is not high, if the employee just makes a "fake" nearby, it still cannot confirm whether the employee arrives at the office. If the Bluetooth beacon and GPS location check are used for the mobile attendance system, the user can sign in through the mobile phone APP and WeChat applet, and the login method of the mobile attendance system is more convenient and accurate.

Compared with the basic Bluetooth communication technology commonly used in the market or developed through the ready-made Bluetooth SDK, RF-star adopts the standard Beacon specification. Through it, the interference signal can be filtered, the transmission parameters of the Bluetooth signal can be adjusted and monitored, and the parameter tamper-proof function is supported. The standard Beacon specification adopted will be very convenient for secondary development.

Function details of Beacon attendance punch-in

a) Monitoring power supply: battery capacity will be provided to facilitate the timely replacement of batteries

b) Modify the Beacon TX power, broadcast interval and other parameters. Add the error tolerance range function, which will allow employees to have a certain error in the GPS according to the actual situation, and then cooperate with the employee's login location (Bluetooth) to perform mobile punch-in records.

c) Prevent tampering of equipment parameters. The APP or applet can perform special parameter registration, naming and location binding for each Bluetooth device of the customer, so as to prevent employees from purchasing the Bluetooth device by themselves and causing the fake enterprise device to punch in.

Through the background platform management, identify and compare the actual punch-in location of the employee and the pre-set location of the device, which can be processed with tolerance within the allowed error range. This is to take into account that there will be a certain offset between the location of the domestic GPS map and the real location, and employees must be around the Bluetooth device to punch in. The positioning accuracy of the Bluetooth signal can reach 2 m ~ 3 m. Generally speaking, the range of Bluetooth punch-in is around 10 m based on Bluetooth positioning experience and positioning accuracy.

The Beacon punch-in solution has been applied everywhere in the market, and various technical information about Beacon can be searched on the Internet. Whether domestic market or abroad, the strong demands of Beacon technology have attracted more and more manufacturers to invest in R&D. As a leading company in the IoT industry, RF-star Technology has played a role as a pioneer. The Beacon RF-B-AR1, RF-B-AR4 launched by RF-star are simple to operate, complete supporting tools, visual configuration parameters, and extremely low use thresholds to help customers shorten the project construction cycle and help customers’ products to land quickly. And there are many Beacon application scenarios in China. At present, the domestic Beacon application is becoming more mature, and the Beacon attendance punch-in chain is beginning to take shape. Relying on the Beacon products’ advantages of low-power and low-cost, RF-star Technology has opened a broad prospect for the application of Bluetooth attendance punch-in.