BOHR International Journal of Internet of things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 2022, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 25–34 DOI: 10.54646/bijiam.2022.05 www.bohrpub.com METHODS Automation attendance systems approaches: a practical review Ata Jahangir Moshayedi 1 , Atanu Shuvam Roy 1 , Liefa liao 1 , Hong Lan 1 , Mehdi Gheisari 2,3 * , Aaqif Afzaal Abbasi 4 and Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Bamakan 5 1 School of Information Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou, Jiangxi, China 2 Department of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China 3 Department of Computer Science and Technology, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran 4 Department of Software Engineering, Foundation University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan 5 Department of Industrial Management, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran *Correspondence: Mehdi Gheisari, mehdi.gheisari61@gmail.com Received: 26 April 2022; Accepted: 19 April 2022; Published: 19 May 2022 Accounting for people is the first step for every manpower-based organization in today’s world. Hence, it takes a significant amount of energy and value in the form of money from respective organizations for both implementing a suitable system for manpower management as well as maintaining that same system. Although this amount of expenditure for big organizations is near to nothing and rather just a formality, it does not hold as much truth for small organizations, such as schools, colleges, and even universities, to a certain degree. This is the first point. The second point for discussion is that much work has been done to solve this issue. Various technologies, like biometrics, RFID, Bluetooth, GPS, and QR Code, have been used to tackle the issues of attendance collection. This study paves the path for researchers by reviewing practical methods and technologies used for existing attendance systems. Keywords: biometric, attendance systems, QR code, RFID, face recognition, software system Introduction Student collection and management is one of the most time- consuming tasks in any school, university, and education system. In fact, gathering attendance is a time-consuming job that takes lecture time and the teacher’s energy. But if the teacher does not do so, the school and family will not know if the students are pursuing the light of education. This issue has been tried to be solved using various approaches and technologies currently available. The previous record on the research paper and product shows the biometrics, including palm, iris, facial recognition, RFID, NFC, Bluetooth, barcode, and QR, which are more demanding to make the system as automated as possible. In the next section, various types of these technologies are described. This paper divides them into five subsections—biometric attendance system, facial recognition-based attendance system, RFID- based attendance system, QR code-based attendance system, and finally embedded system-based attendance system. Following this review of existing attendance systems, the paper concludes with a summary of the types and a short excerpt about the importance of attendance management systems and integrating existing technologies to solve modern problems. Attendance systems variety Biometric attendance system The word biometric comes from the word "biometry,” which means the process by which a person’s unique biological 25