Development of a social support intervention with a network of caregivers to find wandering Alzheimer's patients as soon as possible: A social computing application in healthcare

Locating and securing an Alzheimer's patient who is outdoors and in wandering state is crucial to patient's safety. Although advances in geotracking and mobile technology have made locating patients instantly possible, reaching them while in wandering state may still take time. However, a social network of caregivers may help shorten the time that it takes to reach and secure a wandering AD patient. This study proposes a social computing application in healthcare, which is designed to form and direct a social support network of caregivers for locating and securing wandering AD patients as soon as possible. The proposed system consists of three major components; a tracking device, a middleware and a mobile application. The tracking device has a Subscriber Identity Module for Global System for Mobile Communications Network (GSM) installed on it, and is responsible for communication between an AD patient and the system (e.g. transmission of location updates in varying periods). The middleware employs a supervision mechanism to detect potentially wandering patients, a tracking mechanism to locate a wandering patient and a coordination mechanism to communicate with and direct caregivers to wandering patient. The mobile application is the mediator of the interaction (e.g. necessary communication steps to get involved in the search of a wandering patient) between a caregiver and the system during a wandering patient search session. The communication backbone of the system involves the Internet and a GSM network. The major system component, i.e. middleware, is being implemented using Java. Family caregivers will be interviewed prior to and after the use of the system. In order to find out the impact of the system in terms of depression, anxiety and burden, Center For Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, Patient Health Questionnaire and Zarit Burden Interview will be applied to them during these interviews respectively.