Design and development of a mobile application system for accessing suspect information using fingerprint recognition.

Abstract

The purpose the traffic police serves is to ensure law and order is maintained on the roads in the country. It is therefore vital for the force to have a means to identify traffic offenders and take them off the roads. With the aim of contributing a solution that helped the traffic police to identify road offenders, research was done to build a system that could enable police officers gain access to existing records of a suspect using their fingerprint. A mixed methods approach where primary and secondary data was gathered using oral interviews, document reviews and observation was used to establish the problem space in the existing process used to record offenses and make them available to other police officers. The findings revealed that the existing system was inefficient because the reporting process was manual and involved a lot of paper work. A police officer recorded offences committed while they were in the field in the complaint and charge ticket book. At the end of the day, these offences would or would not be entered into the local database back at the station. There was no clear process or timeline to when the offenses were recorded into the EPS system which was currently the only existing means a police officer could access information on previously recorded offenses while in the field. EPS used number plates to pull existing records of a car. The down side to this was that the actual offenders would never be caught if they never drove the car in which they committed the offence. This kept repeated offenders on the road as it was observed that the multiplicity of driver to car was not one to one but a many to many multiplicity. A means that tied a driver to the offences they committed was needed. That is why fingerprints were used in the proposed system to access records on a suspect as opposed to number plates. The functional requirements gathered were analysed using the usecase model which matched each actor to the functions they performed while the nonfunctional requirements were analysed using the four layered approach. The design representations used were class diagrams, sequence diagrams and activity diagrams. Multisim was used to simulate the circuit for the fingerprint module. The proposed system was an integration of a fingerprint module and a mobile application. The fingerprint module captured the fingerprints of suspects while the mobile application provided the interfaces for managing the different information across the system. It was noted that the traffic police task force needed to set up network infrastructure to support the success and sustainability of the proposed system. With the desired network infrastructure up and running, the proposed system would enable traffic police to record offences and make them available to other police officers in real time. It would also enable them access suspect records if any in real time while in the field and this would help them make better decisions that were from an informed point of view hence doing their work better.