Development of Death Scene Investigation Mobile Technology

Abstract Local and state law enforcement, coroner/medical examiner, and public health officials along with federal agencies work together to prevent violent death by prosecuting criminal offenders, identifying and modifying factors that increase risk of violence and other injury-related deaths, focusing prevention strategies on populations at high risk of victimization, and creating safer environments to help prevent violence and injury universally. Given the importance of death scene information for public health prevention efforts and criminal prosecution, innovative approaches are needed to help gather death scene information and forensic evidence in resource constrained settings. Overcoming the inertia of established practice requires a new approach to ensure that measures can be adapted and users can accept them. Our overall goal of this project is to further develop, pilot test, and evaluate a mobile tool (Death Scene Investigation Mobile Technology) intended to improve written scene documentation to correlate with photo evidence and re-create the scene for police, forensic(s), agencies with a legitimate interest, and documentation of decedent information to determine terminal episode history and medical, mental and social history. The DSI-Mobile Tech is proposed to be used as a non-linear checklist guiding the investigator(s) to best practices and giving prompts based on probabilities from previous forensic investigations, results from CDC focus groups and NIJ guidelines. Developing the DSI-Mobile Tech for front line death scene investigators is the primary aim of this proposal. This technology will help death scene investigators gather and record information on precipitating circumstances of deaths, using a standardized guiding format to gain greater detail from survivors and witnesses (i.e., pre-death information) as well as process forensic evidence, uniformly, for post-death examination. This will improve the current standard practices for death scene investigations.