Project Description

The more advanced technology has developed over time, the more it has become essential in our everyday lives. Even for businesses nowadays technology has become a huge assistance in for e.g. helping with production, promoting their business worldwide, ensuring the security of the business both online and in real life. There is also existing technology that enables businesses to monitor their employees within their work environment (e.g. security cameras, ID scanners etc).

The monitoring of employees is one of many factors that contributes to the success of a business as it helps businesses monitor their employees work performance. For example, if one employee were noticed to continuously be away from their work desk more often than necessary and their work performance seems to be lacking, then managements can discuss matters on how to handle the specific employees’ behaviour. In addition, changes can be made to ensure that similar behaviours are not repeated in the future and also enable management to see whether any changes are needed to improve employees working environment.

Hence, the purpose of this project development is to allow employers the ability to wirelessly track and monitor the movements of employees under their management in real time, using the developed web application. GPS (Global Position System) is more of an outdoor tracking method so using the system to track individuals indoors would be impossible, as there is no line of sight available to the satellite (P.Kriz,F. Maly and T.Kozel, 2016).

Therefore, the project idea will be using the localisation technology, Bluetooth, to track employees within their working environment and to obtain their location employers will require the MAC addresses of their employee’s Bluetooth enabled device (e.g. Phones or laptops etc).

As mentioned before, technology has become essential in our lives and studies that have been carried out has shown that 79% of people ages 18-44 have their smartphones with them 22 hours of their working day (A. Stadd, 2013). This result means that the tracking of employees would be more efficient and reliable because of the fact employees are always aware of keeping their devices with them wherever they go. In addition, studies carried out in 2016 by Syntonic assessment found that 87% of companies expect their employees to use their personal devices for work purposes (M. Lazar, 2017). This is one of the leading reasons as to why the project aims to use the Bluetooth enabled devices of the employee as the tracking source.

In having the employee’s device MAC address, employers will be able to track that specific employee. Therefore, the aim of the project is to use raspberry pi’s to listen out for the employees Bluetooth device, collect the RSSI data that is picked up by the raspberry pi, transfer and convert the values into distance(metres) within the server and have the following data visually accessible to the employer via the web application.

 

Implementation of system

The system was implemented within a small area of my house as I was only limited to using my living room. This restricted the amount of data I could collect and how much experimentation I could carry out in regards to distance and signal strength. Also through the duration of the system development there was a lot of trial and errors carried out in regards to the JavaScript codes used to build the system which in turn restricted how far of the development I could make on the project idea.

Here are the list of software’s and hardware’s used for the implementation of the system.

The following presentation shows the steps I took to implement the system within the time limit I had.

The video below is just a quick demo of how the files I created within the server can be accessed.