Authors: Abhishek Rasal, Aditi Kulkarni, Aditya Patle, Apekshita Kalbhor, Suresh Kapare, Reena Pagare
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2022.40403
Certificate: View Certificate
Booking appointments and meetings online is quite common nowadays. However, it can be a time-consuming & tedious process, especially if the appointment system is poorly developed. The paper explains how we established a seamless experience for accepting appointments and scheduling meetings using our app. The Appointment Manager App is an android application built in Flutter to view, schedule, manage and track appointments. It uses Google Firebase for the authentication of users. Users can schedule appointments with the higher authorities of the organisation by selecting a suitable date and time, title and description of the meeting and the designation of the attendee. The appointment data is stored in the Firebase Firestore NoSQL database. These meetings can be effortlessly approved, rescheduled and tracked.
I. INTRODUCTION
Mobile applications are used for several purposes in today’s world. Most of our daily activities now involve a few online interactions, from online shopping to online education. COVID-19 has opened our eyes to a world of new possibilities online, and an online appointment booking system is one of them. Appointment scheduling is usually done by hand, by physically entering meeting information and keeping track of attendees. It is a time-consuming and challenging process and can result in human blunders. Through our mobile application, “Appointment Manager”, we present an online system for facilitating the task of scheduling meetings in the offices of educational institutions, mainly with the higher authorities of the institution. Such a mobile application can make the scheduling process more manageable. Furthermore, given the hectic lifestyles that many of us lead nowadays, an online appointment management system in educational institutions can be excessively beneficial, as it can free up significant time for instructors, university staff, and students. Meetings can be scheduled smoothly by entering details like date, time, the reason for the appointment, the number of attendees. As required, the appointment can be accepted, cancelled, or extended. The Admin can also take notes in the mobile app during the meeting, and easily share these meeting notes with the concerned people via email.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Since online appointment management systems exist in multiple ways, we discovered some relevant works and articles aimed at making appointment scheduling easier. We mostly used Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and ScienceDirect to find scholarly publications for these connected works. We looked at these publications and highlighted their flaws so that we might make appropriate changes to our project.
III. TECHNOLOGIES USED
A. Front-End
B. Back-End
IV. SYSTEM FLOW
This system has two main modules: The User and the Admin sides.
A user can use the User side to create a new appointment. A user must pick an available day, time, meeting title, and agenda for booking an appointment. The admin can then use the Admin Side of the application to approve or reject this appointment request.
The admin can also start and end meetings, cancel, reschedule or extend appointments using the Admin side.
V. IMPLEMENTED SYSTEM
Appointments with higher authorities and officials of various organisations can be scheduled using the Appointment Manager App. The user has to sign in to the app to schedule an appointment. By selecting the authority, the user can choose a date and time from a list of available slots.
Once selected, the user has to provide the title of the meeting, the agenda/description of the meeting and the number of attendees. After submitting the data, a function with Firebase transaction will fetch the number of minutes available in the booked slot. If the available time is greater than or equal to 15 minutes (Default 10 minutes meeting + 5 minutes buffer time), then 15 minutes will be added to the slot timings and an appointment will be scheduled with the details from the user. Else, an error page will be displayed and the user will have to search for another slot. The default state of the appointment will be ‘Pending’ since it requires approval from the Admin.
All the system functions are executed online, making it completely flexible, easy to use and data remains safe & backed up. The information about meeting confirmation, cancellation and rescheduling will be conveyed to the respective people via mobile notifications in real time using OneSignal Mobile Push.
A. Signing in to the App
The app uses Google Firebase Phone Authentication to sign in to the app. An OTP is sent to the phone number provided by the user. After signing in to the app, if the user’s display name & email address exist in Firebase Authentication, he will be redirected to the home screen of the app. Else, the user will be redirected to the Edit Profile page. On the Edit Profile Page, it will ask for the user’s name and display name and will store it in Firebase Authentication as well as in the database created in Google Firestore.
B. Booking Appointments
The user has to select the authority of whom the appointment has to be scheduled. The app will check for the current time after selecting the date. If the current time is equal to or greater than any of the slot timings, that slot will be disabled automatically. Else, the app will check for the slot date and timing in the Google Firestore Database. If the slot is present in the database, it will check for the booked/occupied time. If the time is less than 45 minutes, it will show the slot as ‘Available’ else it will be ‘Disabled’. On selecting the available slot, the user will enter the meeting details such as the Title, Description/Agenda, Designation and Number of Attendees. Priority will be assigned based on the designation. For example, the Dean or Principal of the institute will have the highest priority. On clicking the ‘Schedule Appointment’, a Firebase Firestore Transaction will read the booked time and, if it is less than 45 minutes, it will add 15 minutes (10 minutes meeting time + 5 minutes buffer time) to it and upload the data. The appointment will be in a ‘Pending’ state initially, waiting for the Admin to take action on it.
C. Managing the Appointment by Admin
The Admin can see the scheduled appointments from the users on the ‘Pending Appointments’ Page. These appointments will be sorted according to the date and priority using the designation of the user and orderBy() clause of Firebase Firestore. The Admin can view the details of the appointment and based on that, can ‘Approve’, ‘Cancel’ or ‘Reschedule’ the appointment. Rescheduling the meeting is similar to scheduling an appointment, as it searches for open slots and adjusts the meeting time. These actions will trigger a Push Notification using OneSignal Mobile Push Notifications to the respective users.
D. Extending the meeting by Admin
The appointment can be extended if it is still in progress. The appointment can be extended for up to one hour by the administrator. To extend, the Admin must specify the amount of time to be added to the meeting. Following the meeting's extension, all subsequent appointments will be rescheduled and extended by the specified time to accommodate the extended time. A push notification will be sent to all users whose meeting has been rescheduled.
E. Meeting Notes and Updates
The Admin can take notes during or after the meeting. These notes will automatically be saved in the Firestore Database. After completion of the meeting, the Admin can share these meeting notes along with meeting details with the concerned people via email so that they can take further action as discussed in the particular meeting. The emails are sent using the Email-ID linked with the EmailJS Account to make API calls from the app easily. After completion of the appointment, the Admin can add the status of the appointment so that the user can track the progress.
VI. RESULT ANALYSIS
“Appointment Manager” has been created taking into consideration the issues faced due to manual scheduling of meetings. As of now, most organizations that make use of appointment management systems continue to use a manual method of scheduling meetings and entering details, which can be laborious and error-prone. It can be seen that our app makes this process significantly easier. The process of scheduling, rescheduling and cancelling meetings is much faster and error-free as it is done automatically by the system, and the user has to simply enter the appropriate details in the mobile app. The provision of meeting notes also makes it efficient to send meeting details to the designated persons, and follow-up work can be tracked. Hence, using this system results in an efficient and well-organized method of scheduling meetings and appointments.
VII. FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS
A few more features that we can implement in the future include the integration of IoT (Internet of Things) in the system. A QR code scanner can be placed at the entrance of the office. It will scan the QR code that is generated on the user's appointment page to indicate the start and end of the meeting. After deployment of the app, the pattern of acceptance of the appointments can be monitored and an AI-based model can be implemented. This model will suggest the meetings to accept according to priority so that the meetings with higher priority can be scheduled first. An option could also be given to the users to automatically book the slot so that it will have a high probability of getting accepted.
VIII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We express our deep sense of gratitude to our respected and learned guide, Prof. Dr. Reena Pagare for her valuable help and guidance, and we are thankful to her for the encouragement she has given us in completing this project. We are also grateful to respected Prof. Suresh Kapre, for guiding and mentoring us throughout this project, and for giving us this wonderful opportunity to learn and grow while working on this project. We also extend our gratitude to all the faculty members of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT School of Engineering, and our parents for providing moral support and encouragement.
Our project strives to provide a seamless experience for applying and approval of appointments. As online appointment booking is a frequently used tool, a well-designed and user-friendly app like Appointment Manager will help aid the college authorities. We intend to make this process as less time-consuming and easy to use as possible by providing appropriate categories and sections in the app. Our app aims to facilitate the task of scheduling meetings, mainly with the higher authorities of the university, and providing updates post-meeting, making it truly helpful for them to streamline their appointment scheduling process.
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Copyright © 2022 Abhishek Rasal, Aditi Kulkarni, Aditya Patle, Apekshita Kalbhor, Suresh Kapare, Reena Pagare. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Paper Id : IJRASET40403
Publish Date : 2022-02-17
ISSN : 2321-9653
Publisher Name : IJRASET
DOI Link : Click Here