July 5 (UPI) — Scent compounds emanating from a person’s hand can be used to determine sex, according to a study by researchers at Florida International University published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
“In criminal investigations, dogs have long been used to reliably identify and track people based on their odor. But while human scent evidence for the field is well established, researchers have made little progress in analyzing human scent profiles in the lab,” researchers said in a summary of their findings.
Researchers used mass spectrometry to analyze the scent compounds on human palms from a sample group of 30 women and 30 men.
“After identifying the compounds in each sample, the team performed a statistical analysis to see if they could determine the indvidual’s sex based on their profile of scents,” researchers said.
“The analysis successfully predicted a person’s sex with a 96.67% accuracy rate,” researchers said.
The researchers say the new discoveries could be used to help law enforcement find suspects.
“Robberies, assaults and rape are all crimes that are often executed with a perpetrator’s hands, and thus have the potential to leave behind valuable trace evidence at a crime scene,” the research team said.
“With further validation, the chemical and statistical analyses presented in this paper could be used to uncover many details about a potential perpetrator solely through their hand scent profiles,” the authors said.
The use of scent to identify perpetrators has been criticized by civil rights advocates.
The Innocence Project, which advocates for people who have been wrongfully detained, has said that so-called “scent lineups,” in which perpetrators are identified based on smell by dogs, have led to a number of wrongful arrests.
In 2009, the advocacy group released a report showing that at least five people had been wrongfully arrested via scent lineups, conducted by a Fort Bend, Texas, sheriff’s deputy. Two of the people were wrongfully accused on capital murder charges.
