Dubai Police Platform Cuts Forensic Toxicology Processing to Under a Minute

Four Emirati experts at the force's General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology developed the system. Lieutenant Colonel Dr Rashid Humaid Al Rumaithi led the team, working with Captain Engineer Mohammad Abdul Qader Al Shamsi and forensic toxicology experts Marwa Aqeel Al Janahi and Fatima Ali Al Suwaidi.

Al Rumaithi, the project director, said the old process involved separate manual steps to transfer data, run calculations, verify results and compare them with scientific references. The platform combines these into one workflow that reads laboratory data, completes the calculations and checks the results against references in under a minute. Specialists remain responsible for reviewing the output and making the final technical decision, he said.

Al Suwaidi said the number of data processing steps fell from 10 to two, and six separate calculation procedures were merged into one automated calculation. The time to prepare outputs has dropped from an average of 30 minutes to one minute, she said. Al Shamsi described the system as a smart assistant that supports specialists rather than replacing them.

Dubai Police plans to connect the platform more closely to laboratory instruments to reduce manual data entry. Later phases will update scientific databases, add performance indicators and knowledge dashboards, and explore using artificial intelligence and smart assistants to help specialists find scientific information faster.

The project shows a pattern common in public-sector digitisation in the Gulf: the biggest early gains come from automating and standardising existing workflows, with AI added later on top of cleaner data. For other organisations that run labs, it is an example of how much time can be saved before any machine learning is involved.