The findings, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, could help investigators in determining how a person's location might change due to the movement of a vehicle based on what devices survived and in what general conditions.
For the experiments, the NIST team assembled and ran crash tests using an instrumented vehicle in a series of controlled car crashes. The car was loaded with a total of seven smartphones and nine computers in different locations inside the car.
The experiments simulated different driving scenarios, including front-end and side impacts. The team ran the crash test experiments at different speeds and measured the crash loads. The team then determined how much damage was done to the memory devices and compared the damage to the location and movement of the device based on the measured forces at the device location in the car.
The team found that memory devices are surprisingly resilient to damage and data loss. Even in severe accidents, many devices—particularly those with solid-state drives—retained their data. Devices that were ejected from the car during a crash were more likely to experience damage than devices that remained in the vehicle. These experiments can help investigators piece together the details of transportation accidents and support other forensic work to determine the locations and movements of devices and their users involved in fatal accidents.
