What is … Time-of-Death Modeling?

This page hosts information on Jonas Krone and Zoi Tokoutsi's talk "What is … Time-of-Death Modeling?" at the "What is …?" seminar. The talk will take place on Friday, July 11, 4:00pm at FU Arnimallee 6, SR 031.

Abstract

In forensics, there is a natural interest in determining the exact time of death of murder victims. Thus far this was done by measuring the victim’s body temperature and extrapolating the time of death based on a rather crude physical model.

Recently, there have been attempts to come up with more realistic models that take into account all the different body properties (height, weight, clothing, etc.) as well as environmental factors (outside temperature, wind, heat sources, etc.).

Our goal is to develop a physically accurate, three-dimensional heat flow simulation for the body that can be adjusted to a multitude of scenarios, and estimate the time of death by a curve-fitting scheme for the heat curve.

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