A New Tool for Crime-Scene Investigation
How a Cape Town pathologist turned frustration into innovation
Growing up in Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape, Sipho Mfolozi would accompany his mother to the hospital where she worked as a nurse.
“The hospital was my playground,” he recalls. “I would walk in and out of the wards, watching the doctors at work. They became my role-models.”
In later years, he would help out as a hearse-driver at his father’s funeral parlour, one of the busiest in the region.
These twin beacons on the continuum of life and death steered the young man on a career path that led him to the frontline of forensic medicine, and today Dr Sipho Mfolozi is a pathologist with a passion for innovation.
As a Senior registrar in the Division of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at UCT, this Discovery Foundation award-winner has invented a portable device that could help to improve the accuracy of critical data gathered at the scene of a crime.
The NechroChronometer, soon to go into prototype, is designed to calculate the Post-Mortem Interval (PMI) on a corpse by measuring weather variables such as windspeed and humidity. The device features a built-in weather station, a GPS chip, and a reader for receiving data via Bluetooth from probes on the corpse.
It looks like something out of an episode of CSI, the popular American crime-scene investigation series, but for Dr Mfolozi, it’s a practical solution to a nagging professional problem.
“The device was invented out of necessity,” says Dr Mfolozi. “I was frustrated by the primitive methods used to determine time of death, including a thermometer reading and the plotting of algorithms on paper.”
Tested in a laboratory at UCT, using dummies filled with ballistics gel and clad in neoprene wetsuits, Dr Mfolozi’s NechroChronometer fits neatly into a briefcase, and will eventually be scaled down to the size of an iPod.
With a patent filed by UCT, inviting commercial development, Dr Mfolozi’s invention is proof that South African ingenuity is alive and thriving, even in the field of pathology.
By Gus Silber for the Discovery Foundation
