Pathways to the Identification of Multinational Victims of Mass Disasters: The Role of Blockchain Technology

Learning Overview: After attending this presentation, attendees will have learned, using real-world cases, how blockchain technology adoption can achieve an automated archiving system to fully manage the identification of medical and dental data for comparison and data mining that should promote novel solutions for forensic human identification and Disaster Victim Identification (DVI). Impact on the Forensic Science Community: This presentation will impact the forensic science community by demonstrating how blockchain technology adoption should revolutionize the human identification and disaster management processes worldwide, improving the management of missing persons, Antemortem (AM) data repositories of living people, Postmortem (PM) data repositories of recovered unidentified human remains, interactions with electronic medical and dental records, and helping to facilitate the comparison of compatible biological profiles for definitive identification. The possible applications presented in this study promise enormous benefits to authorities, victims, their families, and society in general. This presentation should create a trusted ecosystem to help forensic science practitioners advance beyond traditional methods and stimulate innovative collaborations with computer scientists in order to improve procedures, especially in the area of forensic dental identification.