Alzheimer’s Notes

Should Alzheimer’s Patients Be Electronically Tagged?

by Mary Emma Allen on April 24th, 2007

An article in the Manchester (England) Evening News, “Plans to Tag Dementia Patients,” introduces the idea of tagging older, or dementia affected, people so they can be tracked by satellite.  This proposal has been met with mixed reaction.

Balancing freedom and safety becomes the issue.  If someone has cared for a family member with Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia, they would be more likely to favor a tracking monitor.  If a person never has, they might consider this restrictive and repressing the person’s freedom…a form of unnecessary control.

We had a friend, in the mid stages of Alzheimer’s, who left his wife at the beauty shop and never returned to pick her up.  He simply drove off.  About two weeks later, he was found, dead from exposure, in a woods, about 100 miles from home.  He somehow had driven off the main road, onto a road in the woods, gotten stuck in the mud, and wandered off.

My aunt disappeared from my mom’s house one morning, slipping out when Mother thought she was in the bathroom.  After about an hour of searching the neighborhood, a friend told Mother she’d seen Auntie a mile or so up the road, trotting along in her orange bathrobe.

In both of these cases, a monitoring device would have been a great help.  Mother could have found Auntie sooner.  Our friend might never have died of exposure.

Discussion in this article presents many pros and cons of these monitoring devices for the elderly and dementia afflicted

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