GPS tracking devices, technology that allows real time tracking, are being encouraged by experts to lower the costs of finding dementia patients who have gotten lost.
Scientists debate whether they can actually reduce the risk of harm or whether they are simply quick fixes to suit caretakers in new reports published in British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Although GPS trackers are not a universal cure, they do mean that patients can be found faster, explained Rupert McShane, a consultant in old age psychiatry at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.
Quick recovery lowers risk, he added. Fifty percent of all dementia patients who are not found within one day die or are severely hurt. However, caretakers often don’t call for help right away, hoping that they don’t have to involve the police if possible.
Additionally, the risk of admission to a care home increases by a factor of two when a person with dementia gets lost.
“It is therefore surprising that there has not been more attention paid to ways of reducing this,” McShane said.
The moral challenges can be overcome, according to the specialist, who listed different instances where tracking device can assist in balancing safety and autonomy for vulnerable patients. McShane explained:
“The evidence that patients are given more freedom once they start using a tracker is contradictory, but the finding that the device can reduce conflict between patient and carer is plausible and useful.”
Although privacy is critical, “the desire for privacy and isolation should not be confused with getting lost.” “It is time to move on – and we should begin by abandoning the term ‘tagging,’ which has stigmatizing associations,” McShane concluded.
On the other hand, Desmond O’Neill, a professor of geriatric medicine at Trinity College Dublin, said that care needs to be centered on the patient instead of looking for quick fixes to be convenient for caretakers.
The approval of tagging “has generally been researched among formal and informal carers only, with the views of those with dementia relegated to the sidelines,” he added.
Alternatively, he called attention to a developing area of research on technology and dementia “that has led to a range of assistive technology – for example, picture telephones, lamps, lost item locators – which are genuinely enabling and supportive of independent living.”
He argued that this positive and person centered method should be pushed with wandering.
O’Neill also pointed out that tracking devices “may provide a false sense of security” and explained that more standard approaches like identity bracelets “may be equally effective and less costly.”
Money saving has been named a main objective by the police force involved in implementing a tagging program for dementia patients in the UK, according to O’Neill. A previous study showed that caring for people with dementia is costing up to $157 billion every year in the U.S., which makes the disorder more expensive than treatments for heart disease and cancer.
He added that among UK councils, the practice seems to be more and more common.
O’Neill concluded:
“Is the impetus for shaping policy for a complex and common syndrome to be driven by policing, putative cost effectiveness, and ethical insensitivity, or can we use this debate to reclaim a person centred approach that embraces the person with dementia as the lead collaborator in a coalition of care?”
Written by Sarah Glynn