Improving Deceased Identification and Claiming System in Mortuaries Using Fingerprint: A Developing Country Perspective

The mortuary industry in most developing countries are in need of improvement on the receiving and releasing of deceased persons. Paper-based mortuary systems lack reliability, timely information retrieval, accountability, data security and access control; compared to computer-based, mortuaries are the norm in advanced countries. This study reports the development of a fingerprint-based biometric mortuary system for deceased identification and claiming. The system design methodology was based on the object-oriented analysis and design approach using the UML. The system was implemented with Java as the frontend and processing logic, interacting with MySQL Server at the backend for transaction management. As generated from the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital Calabar, the result of this study shows that, with the fingerprint verification technique, mortuary establishments in Nigeria and related countries can enhance the deceased claimant verification process to avoid releasing the deceased to wrong persons and reduce deceased identification anomalies. The study has shown that biometrics technology can enhance deceased identification and release in resource-constrained settings like Nigeria.