Spent a fraught Friday evening looking for my father-in-law who either has dementia or a concussion-related illness from years of rugby. He went out for a walk with our dog. Usually this is a 20 minute wander around the park which is outside our front door. After an hour we got worried and set out on the bikes to have a scout for him. He turned up three hours later, having been found and given a lift back to our house by a stranger.

We’d like to fit him with a tracker of some sort. He is paranoid about phones so won’t carry one, which would have been the easy thing. There are loads of “smart” watches on amazon designed for this sort of thing & they all to be the worst form of Chinese tat with dreadful reviews and a pile of unnecessary features.

We thought about an Apple watch, but one with its own sim is way too expensive.

Has anyone any experience of the doro watches, which appear to be exactly what is required?

Doro Secure® 480

We had the same problem with my Dad; he insisted on walking to town for a haircut and was found by the Police hours later, well after closing, wandering around with no coat, shorn like a lamb and freezing. Didn’t know where he had gone so next day we visited every damned barber in town until we found his coat hanging on a hook.

This is my area of work. We use the doro watch and it works very well, currently have about 20 in use and no issues with them at all. Recommended.

That’s interesting to hear @franksinatra

Do you have to subscribe to a service, or could we use it standalone & just have a phone list of family that it would alert?

Hope you find something that works for you and him but IME it’s time to start thinking about full time care once they’re wandering off and getting lost.

Do you have to subscribe to a service, or could we use it standalone & just have a phone list of family that it would alert?

Interested here too -followed a link from the Doro page to a retail website that said it’s 350 quid for the watch then a fiver a week for the service.

Dementia Tracker GPS Watch w/ 2-Way SOS Calls (Pay No VAT)

A guy who I bump into walking his dog has a small gps device which is attached to the dogs harness, it’s linked to his phone. Not sure of the brand but something you could look at.

Can’t you just slip a Tile into/onto his pocket/wallet/keys?

Cheaper option.

Can’t you just slip a Tile into/onto his pocket/wallet/keys?

You can only keep track of something within Bluetooth range. Then you’d be relying on the “last seen” position. Must be something out there cheaper than that rip-off above though.

SO the watch and most pendants (we use OneTouch form the Keysafe company) are dumb smart phones. They have a roaming sim and connect a call if you press a button on the device. You have a choice of where that call goes to. Alerts can go straight to family members or an Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC). The ARC will be more expensive but you can guarantee they will answer an alert 24hrs a day. If you don’t use an ARC and have yourself set up as primary contact, you have to be certain of answering the phone if it rings. If it goes to voicemail the device will think the call has been answered and won’t call a secondary number.
The user doesn’t have to activate the alert button though, if they fail to return or if you are worried you can log on to a browser and see their location any time (you can always do this, irrespective of where alerts are set to go.)
You can also set geofencing or bread crumb trails (if phone is in poor signal area).
Your local Social Work team may pay for this service following an needs assessment, worth considering if money is tight or if you are already involved with Social Work. Policies vary depending on where you live, in our area for example SW will pay for the device but not the monthly connection or monitoring charge.
Like buying a mobile phone, you will usually pay for the device and monthly connection fee (sim). You will then pay extra if using an ARC to receive the alerts. If he is not likely to use alerts and you want it to just locate him then I wouldn’t bother with an ARC.
Yes they seem expensive for what they are but they are robust, reliable and easy to use. As a member of Mountain Rescue I regularly go out to look for lost elderly people, very often with tragic and avoidable outcomes. These device save lives.

Just a couple of other things whilst I think about it.

Speak to the local police safer communities team and ask about the Herbert protocol. This is very useful for people at high risk of going missing.
Watches are great if you think he will wear it of if there is someone there to remind him to wear it. It will need charging every couple of days.
Do get one though, I have many example few where these have saved anxiety, expense and lives.

When I used to work in location based services the Trackaphone guys were pretty hot on this stuff. Awful website pick up the phone to them..

Can you use a cheap smart phone with Sim deal ?

(This obviously assumes the phone can be kept charged and is taken with him)

<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>Turn on location sharing on Google Maps on the phone and you can then see where he (or the phone is) when you get concerned.</span>

if you think of how difficult it is to keep a sports watch and phone linked together by bluetooth I think I would want a single device (the watch) that did everything.  Especially like that it will do a low battery alert so you can go and recharge it

Trackers are appearing with 4G connectivity – so will track out of range of the phone – not sure if you can get them over here yet, or whether your phone has to be on the same network.
https://www.sprint.com/en/landings/tracker/tracker-plus-safe-found.html

My Mum is in secure care now but we used a small tracker device that we bought from Amazon called “Spytrack Nano”

We found it very reliable and useful. I wouldnt try to use some overly technical device as in my Mums case she lost the ability to use a phone, even to accept and incoming call etc. My Mum like many “older” ladies would never leave the house without her bag and it was fortunate that this habit was ingrained as we were able to leave it in the lining of her bag and use the app to track her when she left the house. The app is also very good and the whole family were able to track and respond if needed. It did need charging every several days and there is a monthly SIM charge.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/SpyTrack-Nano-Portable-Personal-Tracking/dp/B01LCQ2KBM/ref=sr_1_19?keywords=tracker+device&qid=1560845365&s=gateway&sr=8-19

It will need charging every couple of days

For trackers stashed in a bag the challenge is staying on top of charging – you can add an external power pack which helps but….

– Make sure the trackers charging port is on an edge rather than the face of the tracker – ones of the face (or back) get damaged easily

– Make sure the battery pack is one that gives continuous charge rather than automatically cuts off once the tracker is charged (as most do) some batteries will switch to continuous charge if you press and hold the button for a few seconds but don’t do anything to indicate the change of status and I’ve found identical looking/model batteries by the same manufacturer can vary as to whether they will switch to continous

We’ve ended up using a couple of Voltaic Systems V15 batteries – one always connected to the tracker one re-charging – as the only compact/light batteries I can find that have a continuous charge function and give you a clear indication that you’ve switched it on.

who either has dementia or a concussion-related illness from years of rugby.

Tracker technology aside…. ‘either’? Maybe you’ve left it unsaid in the OP but has anything been done to investigate/ diagnose / treat this?

He turned up three hours later, having been found and given a lift back to our house by a stranger.

had similar with my Mother took a wrong turn and lost a good couple of hours but not that far from home …. i used the do you want to rely on strangers or a carry a phone argument whilst it was still hot

as to the Doro cost and subscription the outlay may be more than a cheap smartphone but the subscription isn’t a lot different to a monthly phone cost

Thanks for all the info, it’s been very useful. We’ve gone for the doro watch and I’m off to deploy it this afternoon.

Yeah he has been diagnosed, he is on an array of medication to control various things – the lack of awareness/general “switched-on-ness”; the paranoia and overly self-conscious outlook which doesn’t tie in with an ability to dress correctly all the time. They can’t be sure if its Alzheimer’s or concussion-related as it’s relatively early days. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Tractive might be worth a look – clips on to a belt or collar roams across networks and also available with an extended battery. Works really well and the cost of 2 years data is about £80.

https://tractive.com/en/pd/gps-tracker-dog

Just a quick update: thank you all for the advice, it was very useful and much appreciated. We got the doro watch and it’s been great so far. FIL was away on holiday with MIL and her sister for two weeks in Crete & we were able to keep tabs on him when required.

Some things to note:
It has a very long run time. It does this by generally keeping GPS turned off. You effectively send it a SMS from the monitoring portal to enable realtime tracking.
When at home it uses its proximity to a bluetooth beacon to know where it is. The combination of these two are its real USP.

The website/portal is a little clunky, but it works.
If you send it a “track now” request from the portal it can take some time to get data back.
You can configure all sorts of alerts on the site, covering things like location, geofence boundary traversal, status of the device, lack of movement of the user. But these either come through as a call or an email. Would be better if it could text.

It does indeed work as a phone. But it will only accept calls from numbers in a contacts list. This is good as it prevents cold callers. The sim is a finnish e-sim. I suspect using it as regular phone will hammer the battery and the caller’s wallet.

You cannot turn it off and it has no flight mode. This is a little tricky when flying (I was particularly aghast at this). You can get doro to turn it off for a while, but it turns out, not at 9pm on a saturday night until 2am on a sunday while they were flying.

It looks like a proper watch & he’s happy to wear it.

Overall, we’re really happy. Thanks again!

Thats really useful feed back – it can be quite difficult to square the functions a gadget has to how it actually works / solves problems for you.

As a bit of an aside…. Isn’t a shame you can’t just go into a shop on the high street and see the whole array of useful products and services. There’s close to a million people living with dementia and millions more caring for people with dementia. So…. the next time you go into Boots- ask them where their dementia aisle is. The seem to have no shortage of shelf space for products that claim to defy the visible effects of ageing. Thats no excuse for sufferers of the actual effects of ageing to have no visible offer of support.

There are millions of us – sell us stuff.  Take our bloody money!

I use a tracker / app and I also use a camera /intercom/app combo for my mum. The latter didn’t come from boots, or curries or anywhere else you’d think to look. It came from a **** pet shop.