How can I suggest a safety location tracker to my neighbours without causing offence or embarrassment?

My neighbours are a senior Japanese couple and the husband has early dementia and has taken to wandering. He took a suitcase and got on a bus tonight. Who knows where he’d have ended up if someone hadn’t seen him get on the bus while out looking for him. I’ve been looking up resources and using gps trackers is a recommended option to consider from the Alzheimer’s society.

The wife has limited English which is more than my non-existent Japanese. She has a cell phone but is not very tech savvy. Their family are not close by. I’d like to suggest a tile tracker for his wallet and house key but I don’t want to offend. To be clear I’d expect his wife to have the account to track the items not me.

I found a Japanese Alzheimer’s website talking about safety trackers and the tile tracker Japanese site and have printed them off but I’m hesitant about actually giving them to them. When the husband is having a good day he’d understand the technology but I don’t know if he’d think it was an invasion of privacy or a way to help his wife keep him living at home longer. I don’t know how much he’s aware of his mental health.

5 comments
  1. Drop the info in their mailbox. Talk to your ward office if they have an elderly support center or a NPO supporting elderly people with dementia. Generally, there are city/wards funded and supported NPOs serving different needs of elderly population. They can talk to your neighbor. Anyway, if police gets involved a few times when neighbor wanders off, police may ask a social agency for support.

  2. Tags are awful, they don’t have that great of a range and they don’t work very well when an object is moving. You have good intentions but even as tech savvy as I am, those tags frustrate me because I know my object is near but it doesn’t work sometimes

  3. If he carries a cell phone there are Parental apps that provide location services. Family Link is the one that comes to mind.

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