EngageMate: An IoT-Driven Platform for Monitoring Teacher Engagement and Classroom Dynamics

Effective teaching involves more than content delivery; it requires active and reciprocal engagement between lecturers and students, influenced by multiple classroom factors and conditions. For this reason, this paper introduces EngageMate, a web-based teaching assistance platform that integrates IoT sensors and multimodal recognition technologies to monitor environmental conditions and lecturer engagement. EngageMate provides lecturers with detailed analytics including emotional states, environmental factors (temperature, humidity, air quality, noise, and luminosity), and class timing data, accessible through intuitive visual dashboards. To assess the usability and perceived usefulness of such a system, an experimental study was conducted involving university lecturers, who tested EngageMate and provided feedback through structured interviews. Results highlight lecturers' positive perception of using data from intelligent monitoring systems to enhance self-awareness and effectively adapt their teaching strategies, providing initial insights into how personalized feedback and classroom condition tracking can pave the way toward a smarter, more responsive educational environment.