The difference between wandering and lost is a disease.
The Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA) has just released a step-by-step educational DVD about wandering. In the 43-minute DVD, experts and family caregivers address the difference between wandering and becoming lost, prevention strategies and measures to take when a crisis occurs. For more information and to purchase the DVD, visit www.alzfdn.org/estore or call toll-free 866.AFA.8484.
The art of senile dementia
Willem De Kooning, the great 20th century abstract exressionist, noticed that he was having problems remembering things. His wife Elaine, wrote to him warning that despite his good physical health that he would soon be a vegetable. Though painful, the remark was darkly truthful. deKooning was a victim of Alzheimer’s and was going to lose his genius, his memory and his will. Yet his genius persisted allwong him to create more than three hundred works in the decade before he succumbed.
Curiously a panel of curators was establishied to determine the value of De Kooning’s contribution because his dementia should surely have impacted his genius. Even more curious was the lack of a similar inquiry in the 50’s and 60’s to evaluate the works he created as an alcholic.
The stigma of dementia afflicts all of us… rendering us as vacant as a blank canvas. The vacancy left by those lost memories means that we may wander and need assistance finding the path home. To that seeming simple challenge of remembering our address, thirty satellites circumnavigating the globe send the location of lost love ones carrying Personal Location Systems notifying caregivers of their precise location before the paint dries.
The extended span of our lives will be met by the limitless reach of GPS/PLS
Frost & Sullivan’s expert analysts thoroughly examine remote vital sign monitoring technologies: clinical thermometry, blood pressure monitoring, pulse oximetry, multiparameter monitoring systems, and wearable vital signs monitoring. The value of these systems is of growing importance as our life spans extend beyond the capabilities of an overtaxed health care infrastructure.
It has been estimated that the worldwide geriatric population is increasing by 2 percent every year owing to advances in health care services, advanced surgical procedures and new medications coming to market.
The progressive increase in the senior population will certainly increase the pressure on health care providers to meet this ever expanding demand for quality, timely care. Availing health providers with timely patient vital sign data can be the tipping point for a critical resource deployment decision.
“Vital Sign monitoring is now available as wearable monitoring systems, such as wearable heart rate monitors and respirometers that are increasingly being used in sports, medicine, and home monitoring,” according to the analyst of the study. “In addition to being wearable, vital sign monitoring solutions have become integrated into wireless monitoring systems that enable clinicians to collect patient data across large distances and locate them with GPS certainty.”
It is evident that vital sign monitoring technology has evolved both in terms of functional efficiency and breadth of application. “The trend is toward the integration of independent monitoring solutions and development of wearable diagnostic monitoring solutions that would enhance the quality of health and personal health monitoring independence,” explains the analyst. “Medical professionals will have the option to monitor their patients at a distance without requiring them to be present for oversight evaluations or to provide an appropriate response to an emerging situation.
GPS Personal Location Services technology provide the communication platform for the exchange of vital signs as well as the history of activity with current location. Invaluable is an inadequate nomenclature for life-saver.
Forget Me Not
Every 7 seconds someone, somewhere turns 50. Of that number, hundreds of thousands of loving fathers, mothers, sons and daughters are realizing that they may become a victim of Alzhiemer’s.
The journey to the golden years will mark more than twice as many women as men with the as yet incurable curse of dementia…why women? Statistically they live longer and so have more years to contract the disease. More over, their 9.8 million family and unpaid care givers will provide 8.4 billion hours of care. Can you calculate what those numbers will be over the course of the next decade as the millions of baby boomers reach 65?
The Technology Pavilion at the Life@50+ National AARP Event & Expo Washington, DC, September 4–6, 2008 will include a “Nana” Technology© booth, hosted by Andrew Carle, a national expert on senior care and technology, and an Assistant Professor in the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University. Professor Carle acts as an advisor to GTX Corp, specifically targeting the development of applications for location aware devices to assist the home bound elderly who are memory impaired. He has coined the term “Nana” to describe helpful technologies for older adults and the role such technologies will play in meeting the needs of aging Baby Boomers.
We will become ghosts of our former selves
For most of us,100,000 deaths in an incomprehensible number. Put the face of a person we know on those numbers and that changes everything. Ronald Reagan is a face among those thousands as was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Swift, and Frederick Law Olmstead. Each a victim of Alzheimer’s disease… an affliction more feared than cancer or heart disease… because the only hope is that we won’t be the one in five that succumbs while a treatment is researched for the next generation.
As Alzheimer’s progresses, the disease will promote “wandering.” Once out of home and out of the sight of care givers it is more than likely than unfortunate circumstances will befall them. Locating wanderers is stressful, dangerous and costly.
Tracking technology exists that will present their location on Google maps from cell phones and PDA’s in real time directly to the care giver allowing municipal services to be available to address more serious situation. To learn mmore about the potential of GPS and Personal Location Services visit; www.GTXCorp.com
Making Sense of the Senseless
Scientific discovery is predicated on an intricate network of proofs and agreements. Alzheimer’s disease has no such agreements or proofs from the scientific community and so finding a cure must wait until a cause can be agreed upon.
So complex is the disease that current thinking holds that the affliction may be the random result of a myriad of causes without a predictable pattern.
The only agreement shared by researches is that of the damaged cerebral landscape and the ravaging effects on the family and caregivers that will become witnesses to the inevitable slide into senselessness.
In the fall of 2008 there will be a number of sponsored “Walks” to raise awareness of the devastating impact that Alzheimer’s will have on our lives and what we can do to make sense of those that will wander and support those that will retrieve them.
There is no forgetting Alzheimer’s
We are the sum of our memories… remembrances tucked neatly into three pound cerebral packages as fragile as a potato chip with one hundred trillion incomprehensible pathways taken completely for granted until it malfunctions.
Alzheimer’s estimated monetary cost of $700 billion will pale by comparison to the loss of productivity and intellectual wealth which will diminish our civilization imprisoning the memories of an entire generation in a crib of cerebral plaque.
The progression of Alzheimer’s will cause one of every four victims to wander…If not found quickly, they will succumb to the elements, accidents or attacks. Searching for them…hundreds of thousands of them at a time…may precipitate the collapse of our current municipal and health support systems.
One possible solution is incarceration, another is sedative drugs, but one other provides care givers with the ability to manage their charges whereabouts by tracking their locations in real time with a miniaturized GPS transceiver sending signals to personal computers, cell phones or mobile devices… a personal location service.
To learn more about GPS Personal Location Services visit: www.GTXCorp.com
Or take a read of David Shenk’s “The Forgetting” and learn what Andy Carle is calling Nanna Technlogy; http://images.usatoday.com/tech/graphics/nana_tech/flash.swf