Lend a hand to help crime-solving research at Lancaster
A ground-breaking project is studying the uniqueness of the human hand to help solve child abuse cases. You can help the team by sharing pictures of your hands.
H-Unique is a five-year Lancaster University project studying the uniqueness of the visible anatomy of the human hand.
It builds on our ground-breaking work in the identification of child sex offenders from images of their hands.
The aim of the project is to identify which features of the hand, such as vein patterns and knuckle creases, can be used to build the most reliable tool for identification and to train computers to automate the comparison of images. This will enable the examination of vast amounts of evidence and support criminal cases.
To achieve this, we are creating the world’s largest database of hand images, and we need your help.
You can become of our 5,000 ‘citizen scientist’ volunteers – all you need to do is anonymously complete a short questionnaire and contribute images of your hands using a smartphone. To find out more and take part, visit https://h-unique.lancaster.ac.uk/.
If you are on campus, you can instead visit us to also take infrared images of your hands. To arrange a visit, contact h-unique-enquiries@lancaster.ac.uk.
