U.S.A.
Everyone Else
Health
Science
Business
Technology
Sports
Video Games
Entertainment
Future
Humour
NEWS > SCIENCE > GPS SHOES WOULD TRACK ALZHEIMER’S PATIENTS, SHOE THIEVES
GPS SHOES WOULD TRACK ALZHEIMER’S PATIENTS, SHOE THIEVES
November 2 2011
San Francisco, CA – There is probably no disease more destructive to a family than the erosion caused by Alzheimer’s and dementia. Unlike other ailments of the body, say cancer, those diseases take away the person long before they take away the body. They erode the person the family knows and loves, they take away the life they have lived both for themselves and with the family.
We are not much closer to finding a solution to those diseases, unfortunately, but new advances in other areas have at least made the symptoms a little more manageable, in particular the wandering.
New shoes, equipped with GPS trackers, would allow families and hospitals to track down lost and wandering loved ones, giving caregivers one less thing to worry about. Already a few patients in the San Francisco area have been equipped with the new shoes, something which has also raised the interest of law enforcement officials concerned about the growing shoe theft trade, especially prominent amongst the elderly and impaired.
“Wandering in fact is a very big safety issue. We do know that if people aren’t found within 24 hours, the risk of death goes up substantially. They don’t always know how to protect themselves from the elements or find a safe location,” said Ruth Gay of the Alzheimer’s Association in Northern California and Nevada.
Other devices have been tried in the past, such as wristwatches and bracelets, but often those end up being lost or stolen while the patients wander the streets. Shoes though, according to police officials, are the item most frequently stolen and tracking devices would allow officials to crack down on the trade once and for all.
“This has been an ongoing problem. Usually in this area when we find a person who has been wandering they almost never have their shoes on their feet. For a long time we assumed they had been lost but recent evidence has shown that they may have in fact been stolen by gangs involved in the shoe trade, specifically the medical shoe trade,” said a spokesperson for the San Francisco police department. “This is another tool we can use to halt this trade which has been a major part of the financing of these criminal organizations. Hopefully with this technology we will be able to track down these groups and end them once and for all, allowing people to keep their shoes.”
Stolen medical shoes are estimated to be a multi-thousand dollar trade throughout the Bay area.
“Any new technology to help fight crime, especially when those crimes affect the elderly, is a good thing. Unfortunately, any new technology is also open to circumvention by criminals. The goal is, always, to make the methods of getting around the technology more expensive than the profits and if that can be accomplished you win,” said Scrape TV Crime analyst Willard Weston. “If these devices are embedded in the shoes they would have to be destroyed to remove them and that would make them unprofitable, meaning that these elderly patients will be allowed to retain their footwear and that is a good thing for everyone.”
Patients have not been any help in identifying the shoe thieves with many claiming former Presidents and move stars needed to borrow them.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
NEWS > SCIENCE > GPS SHOES WOULD TRACK ALZHEIMER’S PATIENTS, SHOE THIEVES
LINK IT! http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Science/pages-4/GPS-shoes-would-track-Alzheimers-patients-shoe-thieves-Scrape-TV-The-World-on-your-side-2011-11-02.html |
TWEET IT! http://goo.gl/CqQxB |
BOOKMARK IT!  
|
|---|
Scrape Store
