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Comment by LorenPechtel | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a dementia tattoo that could be phone-scanned. Put it on the hand so in almost all situations it would be exposed. You see someone with the tattoo that's apparently without a caretaker--scan the tattoo, the caregiver gets the location where it was scanned and if the person is reported missing the scanner is told they're missing.

Obviously, a privacy issue but I would think the safety aspects would outweigh that.

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This isn't an unreasonable idea, but there's a population of 7+ million Americans, especially aging ones, who might be adverse to ID tattoos for reasons that go a bit beyond privacy issues. A non-(easily)-removable bracelet might be more acceptable.

Yeah, if you could make a suitable bracelet it would be even better because it could be fitted with something akin to an AirTag.

I think an AirTag in a shoe would be best. Also a good idea for little kids.

I've hot glued AirTag to their shoe. Dementia is not a simple problem. This solution works in some of the stages of dementia. At stage 5 they don't even wear shoes when they wander off.

Or we could just cut straight to the chase and put a microchip in them.

A microchip is too small, it can't have the range needed.

This is exactly what exists, the article covers this towards the end.

I wouldn't go as far as a tattoo - something closer to an allergy bracelet would be a less invasive solution.

You also should consider the degraded skin of the elderly, the dangers of anaesthetising them, and the difficulty of putting (potentially very uncooperative) dementia patients through painful procedures.

There's also lower complexity community wide solutions like fake bus stops in and near nursing homes - it may not be a catch all, but it's nice mitigation for an unresolvable issue.

The optics of that are absolutely awful. It does not matter how good of an idea it might or might not be. It simply cannot happen.

There's no good optics possible about your relative's personality dissolving into nothingness, his confused body wandering about.

Yeah, but adding something that millions of people remember as a way to catalog and systematically murder them isn't helping the situation.

And many, many more millions of people are somewhere between "neutral towards" and "I have absolutely no problem with" tattoos.

And if you explain to the ones that -personally- do have a problem with it why you want to tattoo an ID on them, and explain it near the start of the process where their mind is eaten away, so they have a solid chance to understand what you're saying, there's a high likelihood that those folks would consent to the process... especially those who've personally interacted at length with someone who's been largely-erased by dementia.

No offense but have you ever talked with holocaust survivors? These folks often won't even interact with government services that require identification.

Sounds like it won't work for them. Further I think you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery with tattoos. It will work for lots of other people though.

Holocaust survivors are a infinitesimal minority among elderly people, it's pretty much a non-consideration. There are probably more people with tattoo dye allergy if you want to go down that alley.

Amazingly, I find there were 161 thousand in Israel as of last year. I would have thought age would have taken a lot more of them by now--but with an average age of 85.5 they're dropping rapidly.

I do agree it's not an issue overall, whatever you do won't cover everyone anyway and any large-scale system takes a while to deploy--there will be a lot less by the time it's ready to use.

Would a dementia village[0] be better?

Both feel bad in a way. Hogeweyk is a bit Truman show.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogeweyk

That sounds much better, outside of cost (and that it probably doesn't scale so amazingly).

With existing facial recognition tech, you don't need any tattoos.

I think barcode tattoos and chip implants have a hold on culture because of cyberpunk fiction, but there's no reason for any of that now. Facial recognition is enough for pretty much any task like this and physically non-invasive.

A QR code to a website that has information about you would be pretty useful should you ever be incapacitated and need assistance.

& a short url written below it. I know QR code has error levels, but even the ones printed on paper sometimes gets damaged beyond repair. That short url domain need to be kept maintained forever, so maybe a government domain?

How do I know it's not a hacker pretending to be a person with dementia, and the URL will take me to a malicious site?

Solar-powered subdermal battery-amplified RFID, I think the range is ~100 meters? Probably could connect to cell phones. CIA's In-Q-Tel bought up the technology over a decade ago IIRC, Hi-Tek Chips was the initial developer?

Fairly dystopian, certainly, but probably in wide use today.

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