Devices track lost Alzheimer’s patients

Scripps Howard

It took only two minutes to find a missing Alzheimer’s patient last week in Towanda, Pa., and 47 minutes last month for a person in Norfolk, Va.

They were both wearing a bracelet that operates on radio telemetry, which helps track someone who wanders.

In 45 states, some 805 public service agencies are tracking missing people with equipment from Project Lifesaver, a nonprofit headquartered in Chesapeake, Va. It’s been 100 percent effective in helping to locate 1,790 people since 1999.

Equipment for Project Lifesaver costs about $8,000, and an additinoal $300 a year for battery and band replacements for the bracelets, said Amber Whittaker, director of media relations for Project Lifesaver.

There are other tracking devices such as Global Positioning Systems, but Whittaker believes radio telemetry is more effective because GPS satellite signals can become lost in dense areas like a forest.

Now two Tennessee doctors who do research with Alzheimer’s patients want to bring Project Lifesaver to Memphis.

Dr. Linda Nichols, a University of Tennessee Health Science Center professor and Memphis Veterans Medical Center researcher, and her colleague, Dr. Jennifer Martindale-Adams, believe the device may have helped on May 5. That’s when 86-year-old Elizabeth Ferguson, who suffered from slight dementia, drove away from her Memphis home headed to a doctor’s appointment and vanished.

The problem, says Ferguson’s daughter, Cheryl Feeney, is that her mother wouldn’t have worn the bracelet.

“If we could have gotten a dentist to implant a microchip in her tooth, it would have worked, but she was cognizant enough to be aware of a bracelet like that,” Feeney said.

Feeney is working with a state legislator in Seattle, where she lives, to sponsor a Silver Alert law, which is similar to Amber Alerts that are issued for missing children.

She believes the radio telemetry bracelets are a good idea for people who are more advanced in dementia. Some organizations raise funds to sponsor bracelet costs or establish adopt-a-citizen programs to defray the costs if families are unable to afford the bracelet.

The concept for the device came from a police captain after a failed search to find a man who had wandered away from a nursing home, Whittaker said.