Effect of Screen Protector Type on Touch DNA Recovery from Smart Phone Surfaces

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_60How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Touch DNA; screen protector; Swabbing methods

Abstract

Touch DNA has become an important source of evidence in modern forensic investigations this is due to the common reason of people’s contact with personal devices like smartphones. As smartphone usage increases, people use different screen protectors which would include different materials used in its manufacturing this would definitely impact the amount of DNA left on the screen’s surface. The aim of the research is to describe about how touch DNA recovery is affected by the usage of different screen protectors which are of different surface textures and properties. Four commonly used protectors include tempered glass, matte film, glossy PET, and liquid nano coating were used for comparison regarding the recovery and quantity of DNA samples from them.

Mobiles with different protectors are being used to extract DNA samples from them using standard forensic swabbing methods. The results include analysing which protector can provide more or less DNA, like matte film could provide more DNA, while others like smooth surfaces or hydrophobic surfaces show lower DNA material. The findings would help forensic investigators and labs understand the effect of different screen protectors in dealing with touch DNA samples and what effective methods are to be used while collecting touch DNA.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Gundala Pravalika
AU  - Kadam Lavanya
AU  - Nuta Tejaswi
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/05
TI  - Effect of Screen Protector Type on Touch DNA Recovery from Smart Phone Surfaces
BT  - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advances in Forensics and Cyber Technologies (ICFACT 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 750
EP  - 763
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_60
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_60
ID  - Pravalika2026
ER  -