MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Mrs Pondo wonders whether anyone has any experience or recommendations for installing phone trackers on elderly peoples' phones? Her lovely mum and dad are in their seventies and are having some difficulties - she had a cardiac arrest mebbe five years ago and hasn't been quite the same since, she can be hyper-critical of him, and he has a blockage in the arteries of his neck that means he's a bit confused these days. Generally they rub along fine but from time to time he will have an explosive tantrum and disappear, always to come back contrite, but there are thoughts as to whether we can or should put a tracker on his phone. Any thoughts or advice greatfully received.
Having dealt with this sort of thing a wee bit there are significant privacy, moral and civil liberties concerns over this sort of issue
Would they agree? doing it without there agreement would be wrong IMO. I know you want to keep them safe but they still have the right to take risks. Competency is key. Are they aware of the consequences of their actions?
Its a huge can of worms - what is your intention in doing this?
I agree. I'm uncomfortable with the concept, but the underlying concept is to (hopefully) know where FiL is when things blow up.
Plenty of families have location sharing permanently enabled (consensually!) via Family Sharing or whatever these days. Perfectly normal. What are you getting up to that you don’t want your location known? 😂 Just ask them? Lots of smart watches etc also have fall detection which could be useful too.
get his consent if you can then set it up.
One thing I used to do with folk who wandered was make sure their address was clearly in their handbag or wallet
If he’s going to wander , do you think he will stop and think to himself to pick up his phone ?
I kind of get the point but I’m not sure realistically if it would work
Doing it covertly is creepy and probably illegal unless competency and PoA applies. But my wife and I have mutual tracking on our phones, it's handy when she's travelling and I'm wondering when she's getting back etc.
Especially the "arrived at home" notification when I get up and act busy 🙂
There’s a finish’s company called Doro that makes assistance devices for the elderly.
My father in law has early onset dementia. He’s 73, physically fit, but frankly, is mentally now a child. As such he goes wandering.
We’ve equipped him with a Doro 360 smart watch, this has a home beacon which it uses for location in the home and then switches to GPS once it’s outside. It has built in sim for data and looks like a regular analog watch. We can, if needed call it and speak to him. But we’ve never had to do that. It can also make outbound calls to one number if necessary. I’ve not enabled this. Because it rarely uses the GPS, battery life is really good - up to a week. The sim is provided by the UK distributor, Careium, it has a Finnish number and a fixed subscription fee of about £20pcm.
They do other models (and lots of other useful devices) which are more feature rich, but for us this is perfect as a “where the %#*€s he gone now?” device.
I would just use Google location, share your location with him and ask if he will share back. If you are happy to be tracked then he is more likely to reciprocate.
All my siblings share location with each other and our parents and quite a few riding mates leave it on so my map has quite a few heads bobbing around on it!
Apple airtag, on the keyring?