A few months ago I had a chat with a long-term care nurse about some of the challenges with Alzheimer's, and how often people would just get up and walk out of the facility and go get lost somewhere. I told her that they ought to figure out a way to track the individuals. She told me of an older technology that put radio identifiers in their shoes, so if they walked down the street or went outdoors they could find them, and they could also be found anywhere around the facility, and she worked in a rather large place for a number of years.
She said the biggest problem is they would leave on their slippers, or forget to put their shoes on. She said generally they wouldn't forget their hat, or other articles of clothing, but it didn't do much good if they didn't put their shoes on and that's where the radio identifier was locator to help track them. I told her that the technology today would make it easy to put a smart phone like system inside their hat, and it wouldn't weigh very much at all. She thought that was a good idea, and she did know that most of the men did wear hats around, and they always had their trust in that with them.
Okay so, perfect I thought. Then I mentioned this to another friend of mine. I introduced this concept to a technology expert recently. She told me it is unfeasible because; it is unethical to track someone without telling them first! Okay fine, we'll tell them but they'll forget it anyway. After all, you can simply tell the person with Alzheimer's that they are being tracked every time they wear that hat. The next day, they will forget all about it, and put the hat on.
Indeed, I thought that was a funny comment because they are already putting radio tags and radio identifiers in the shoes in this other facility. The technology works, the old technology is fine, as long as those individuals are wearing shoes, it doesn't help very much if they leave their shoes in the room, and you assume they're still there in that room, but they are really halfway down the block and already lost. They might walk around for hours until someone in the community brings them back, or calls the police. That was a common occurrence apparently from what the long-term nurse was telling me.
Yes, I think we can solve all these problems, but I wish we could solve the challenges in the brain deterioration associated with Alzheimer's. That's just one terrible disease. Please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Future Concepts. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/
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