An alternative approach to overcome ethical issues of geotracking patients with Alzheimer's disease

Recently, numerous systems for geo-tracking Alzheimer's patients with dementia are developed and reported to be functional for the purposes of security and data collection. However, it was also reported that use of such systems had generated ethical issues. Studies stated possible loss of freedom and autonomy for patients, along with violations of their privacy, which may lead to loss of prestige/dignity. In this study, a geotracking system that aims to balance patients' security and their need for privacy and autonomy is proposed. It simply tries to maintain patients' independence while assuring they are secure. The system introduces a personalized, four-level temporal geofence based tracking, warning and notification protocol that incorporates a safety check mechanism operating over Global System for Mobile Communications network. The system is to be developed using Java and evaluated using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In this paper, the system architecture, together with new tracking measures that can make it possible to overcome ethical issues is presented.