Mike has been caring for his wife, Jan, since she was diagnosed with Dementia in [DATE]. While Jan has her harder days, she's still very much a reliable partner, even adding colour to his story while she overheard him speaking to us on the phone.
“Jan's happy to keep in her handbag. So as long as she's with the handbag, which usually is the case, I can always find her. It's actually a thing that's very poignant in our lives at the moment, and very useful. If we're travelling through an airport or something, it's a great reassurance to make sure you can know she's safe.
It does work the other way round, but I don't think Jan would quite understand how to work the app. So it's literally an app on your phone, I think most iPhones have got it: An app called "Find My," and you register the tracker on that app, and so that if you lose sight of the person you're looking for, you open up the app, Find My, and locate the device. Even at a distance, it will give you the location of where the person is. It gives you great reassurance, really.
The other thing you can use, of course, is she's got her mobile phone with her, which has the same capability, but that's a problem if the phone is switched off, which she tends to do quite a bit because she thinks it saves the battery.
We started using it about a year ago. Jan had a bad. I'd been to the doctor's for a routine blood test. I came back to the house, and Jan wasn't here. I had a frantic day trying to find out where she'd gone to. I ended up ringing the police and found that she was at Folkestone police station. She'd gotten confused and I thought: Well, how can I address this and get some more reassurance that I know where she will be? That hasn't happened since, so this was before she was on medication, and I don't see that happening again in the near future anyway, but that's what sparked the idea of getting some sort of tracking device.
We haven't had call to use it seriously yet. At the moment, it's really only for situations where I'm just reassuring myself. So, for argument's sake: if we're out in a public place and Jane goes into the ladies, I might come out of the gents and think, "hang on she's been a long time– have I missed her?–At least I can look at the app and see, Nope! she's still in there. It gives me peace of mind.
I wouldn't call myself particularly tech savvy, but I've told quite a few people who this might help. Often they might see me using it and say, "what's that?" I think it would help a lot of people in my position. For carers.
It requires trust, obviously, but she's happy to have the thing in her handbag. She doesn't feel it's an intrusion in any way. She'll pull my leg sometimes that I'm keeping tracks on her but she knows the practical value of it and she's quite happy.
The object I chose was between this and photo albums we keep. Every year, we collect the pictures we've taken on our phones and there are these websites where you upload the pictures and they send you a photo album. Jan does get them out quite frequently. They're quite important. If there was a fire, they'd probably be the things we grab. They go back the best part of 40 years and it's nice to have something you can hold in your hands.
But I'll be honest, it's still all a bit new to me. Jan was more technically savvy than I was. But she's moved away from that now, and I've gotten my head around it: The albums and the tracking app. Learning how to deal with failing memory is a tricky subject. But we learn a bit every day, you know, and there's good days and less good days, but generally things... They're pretty good.”