Tracker for wandering Mother in law

[Gottalaugh]

Hi there. Looking for help finding a safe way to keep a watch on my MIL.
She has Alzheimer's and has started wandering off at night (she lives in sheltered housing).
Some days she is absolutely fine, other days she doesn't think she is living at home and needs to go back (she recently moved 150 miles to be near us)
Very scary and we don't sleep very well at the moment as we are so worried about her
Ideally we need something that she can't take of easily without help - any ideas?
Many thanks x

 

[Rosettastone57]

Hi there. Looking for help finding a safe way to keep a watch on my MIL.
She has Alzheimer's and has started wandering off at night (she lives in sheltered housing).
Some days she is absolutely fine, other days she doesn't think she is living at home and needs to go back (she recently moved 150 miles to be near us)
Very scary and we don't sleep very well at the moment as we are so worried about her
Ideally we need something that she can't take of easily without help - any ideas?
Many thanks x

There are members who have experience of trackers, but to be frank, wandering is very difficult to deal with. Once this starts, it's time for 24/7 supervision in my opinion

 

[northerngirl]

There are members who have experience of trackers, but to be frank, wandering is very difficult to deal with. Once this starts, it's time for 24/7 supervision in my opinion

Regarding trackers, the first one I had for wandering hubby, he profusely objected to it, it was about the size of a matchbox, it did work for the 5 days we had it but whether it would fail as did the replacement I bought (which was much smaller) This smaller version my husband removed on two occasions unbeknown to me, then on 3 other occasions the tracker failed causing me great anxiety and stress when I had to go dashing out looking for him. In my opinion they are not reliable as they depend on receiving a gps signal, if anyone knows any different I’d love to hear from you. I now have to put up with hubby constantly rattling of door handles trying to get out, however I’d rather him be safe then me be sorry.

 

[Bay21]

I bought my dad a keyring as the few times he has wandered the one thing he has always had are his keys. In theory it is a great as, for a monthly subscription, you have access to everything on an app and can set boundaries so if he leaves a 50m radius of his home I get a notification saying so. The problem is this doesn't appear to be extremely accurate as I have just found after driving around at 2am looking for him only to find he is in his flat. There is an option to have it without the app and instead you can text it for the location but again that was a bit hit and miss. Like I said, great in theory but not overly accurate.

 

[Alibear]

Hi, yes we also have a tracker for my Mum in her handbag. Its a small vodafone one which was inexpensive but can be a bit hit & miss as said above. I think they get interference from their surroundings and can give false readings leading to panic stations unnecessarily! Having said that it is very useful at times keeping tabs at a distance - we have just learnt to double check the reading before dashing out of the door at 11pm!!

 

[Minky4]

My partner has one of these... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Personal-G...tphone-Black/dp/B0764HC4VW?ref_=fsclp_pl_dp_1
I think it’s great. It can be used as a keyring. It has saved the day many many times
The only problem is that he sometimes likes to discard it and sometimes forgets to take it out with him...so I am thinking about the shoe/sole tracker for him.

 

[Brown Bear]

I just posted this on another thread: We used a number of different devices for my mum over time. First we just used a mobile phone and made sure that her carer charged it in the morning and put it in her handbag. Then we found that wasn't totally reliable so we also bought a pebble-sized tracker (about £80?) and put that in her handbag. This worked well for a while - until the day she left the house without her handbag! The police found her several hours later, and it was all pretty scary and we realised that we needed another solution. I bought a SmartSole (from TechSilver) it was pretty expensive - £250 for the soles themselves plus £29.95/month for the service. They were pretty good and in fact she didn't go off again after that. You can get them to set the refresh time - more frequent means more charging, less frequent means less charging. We had it set to refresh every 5 minutes and were on pretty much daily charging.

 

[rmabo]

I'm not sure why i don't see it mentioned more often - but the trick for me was an apple watch connected to an account i control. Voila. She loves it and never forgets to wear it because it has a slideshow of her grandchildren photos on the screen.