Old Age Problems, New Age Technologies: Radio Frequency Identification Aids in Identifying The Elderly
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Introduction
The numbers are both heartening…and alarming. Through improved nutrition, new pharmacological interventions and astounding new medical technologies, greater and greater numbers of us are living into our sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties…even past the century mark. However, one of the very real consequences of our ability to extend our lifespans is that as we age, there are more and more individuals – and their family members acting as caregivers – who will have to deal with the diseases and syndromes associated with old age. Certainly, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia are at the forefront of these concerns today.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, an estimated 5.2 million Americans of all ages presently have Alzheimer’s disease. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that there are approximately half a million Americans under age 65 who have Alzheimer’s or another dementia, and about 40 percent of them have Alzheimer’s disease. In all, one in eight persons age 65 and over has Alzheimer’s disease at present. Over the course of our lifetimes, one in six women and one in ten men who live past the age of 55 will someday develop Alzheimer’s disease. Over time, the numbers only grow worse, for unless there are medical breakthroughs in the prevention of the disease, estimates are that there will be between 11 and 16 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s by 2050.
All of us have an occasional “senior moment,” forgetting a lunch meeting or misplacing our car keys, but more and more seniors are experiencing far more serious problems with their memory and cognitive functioning. Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for fully 70% of all cases in older adults. Unfortunately, dementia is common amongst the elderly – even those who do not have Alzheimer’s. Today, research has shown that over 40% of those aged 85 and older have some form of dementia.
Dementia is a severely debilitating condition that can occur in persons of any age, but today is largely a condition affecting older people – whether or not they have Alzeheimer’s as an underlying condition. People suffering from dementia experience a global decline in their ability to cognitively function. This leads to problems with perception, reasoning, memory, and temporal/spatial awareness. In addition to experiencing these cognitive impairments, persons with dementia often exhibit potentially dangerous behaviors. These include becoming less inhibited, displaying verbal and/or physically aggressive behavior towards others, or what is known as “wandering” – where the patient moves for no apparent reason.
When a dementia sufferer wanders, he or she may simply restlessly walk about their home or their assisted living facility in an endless manner – often for hours at a time. However, for hospital and assisted living center administrators, a dementia patient who wanders may simply wander out the doors of the facility – creating a quite concerning situation for their facility. Furthermore, patients with dementia who do not have a history of displaying wandering behavior may be at risk of accidentally leaving the facility simply through becoming disoriented or forgetful of their surroundings. Such wandering – even once – becomes a “life or death” decision area for health care administrators. As Patti Harris, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Brookfield, Wisconsin-based RF Technologies, recently remarked: “Although it’s not front page news, there are people who wander outside of nursing homes and freeze to death right outside the building because no one accounted for them.”
People suffering with dementia are therefore in great need of constant assistance and supervision. This places great stress on the personal and professional lives of their caregivers, who are often their adult children and/or spouses. Thus, most eventually need to be cared for in an assisted living facility. And thus, while the direct and indirect costs of caring for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s is calculate to be in the tens of billions of dollars today in the United States and far more on a global basis, this number will go higher and higher with the continuing trend toward a longer-living population with a greater incidence of both Alzheimer’s and dementia.
RFID AND DEMENTIA CARE/DIAGNOSIS
Over the past decade, we have seen increasing levels of utilization of automatic identification technologies in health care facilities, in areas ranging from employee identification and access control to specific applications with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), ranging from equipment monitoring to blood banking and pharmaceutical dispensing. We have also seen long-standing use of RFID for patient identification and control in the pediatric area to match babies with their parents.
Now today, we are seeing increased interest in using RFID to help protect the safety of patients suffering from dementia from wandering outside designated areas of the facility or even outside the doors of their care center. In the process, auto-ID protection helps ease and mitigates the very serious operational and liability concerns health care administrators have over having vulnerable patients in their care venture outside the bounds of the facility. Also, for technologically progressive hospitals and health care facilities that have already undertaken RFID investments in say, equipment tagging and pediatric wing security, such new projects can dovetail with their existing investments in RFID-related hardware, software and integration efforts to expand the benefits of both their legacy projects and a new effort to provide increased security for their dementia patients and their family members.
We have seen
