Tracking System for Patients with Alzheimer's Disease in a Nursing Home

Alzheimer's is a progressive disease that decimates memory and brain functions. It is the most common cause of Dementia. This changes the state of the brain from increasing forgetfulness or memory lapses, mixed-up, that can worsen over time and leads to obliteration of recent activities and memory. In the event that it worsens the person affected by this disease might lose all his memory, ability to function, thinking, reasoning, and even lose his personality and exhibits uncontrolled behavior. The greatest risk factor of this disease is an increasing age, that affects most elderly ages 65 and above, but there are also some known cases at an early on-set condition. Patients with this disease are usually kept in a Nursing Home to be taken care by professional caregivers. Extensive monitoring is demanding and crucial, due to the inability of patients to respond to their environment and high risk of wandering. Due to this the researchers come up with the design and development of a wearable tracking device that will support both family members and caregivers in the challenges that they are facing in monitoring of the patients suffering from this disease. The device has a wearable transceiver that transmits the position of the patient and sends notification to the database in the case that the patient wander and crossed the designated range. Furthermore, it receives an instruction from the database in a form of a voice prompt to the person next to the patient for information. Moreover, ZigBee modules were used for wireless network sensor, Global Positioning System (GPS) module for locating the patient, and Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) module for transmission and reception of data. The researchers considered several factors such as network signal strength, weather condition, and location, in testing for the parameters set. Generally, this corrective and innovative solution of tracking patients with Alzheimer's disease in a Nursing Home, will help the administrators and caregivers in locating the patients before they can get farther from their home.