Alzheimer's Association

MissingPatient.com is ideal for any family/caregiver with an elderly dementia person or any mental disorder. It is FREE, EASY to register as well as navigate, and is accessible to local authorities when every minute counts.

I highly recommend for an additional peace of mind.

Terrific free service for caregivers. I highly recommond Missingpatient.com.

Had a great Experience and I saved so much money which was unbelievable. Very professional and easy to schedule. Very knowledgeable and felt at home.

This is potentially a useful resource if you're a caregiver or relative of a person with a cognitive brain disorder such as Alzheimer's disease, and you're located in the USA.

You start by creating a free account here and registering as many details about the person as you can. If that person then wanders away, the police and ambulance services can access the information quickly and also use the site to issue a public alert. Anyone you've previously placed on a contact list here will also immediately be alerted by both email and SMS text message.

Upcoming is a service that will also track your loved one via the GPS built into their cell phone. The phone on offer is a Boost Mobile model which comes with the GPS tracking software installed for an additional cost of only around $15. And it's a durable model with $5 of credit provided, so all you have to do is make sure your loved one is carrying it at all times. There's a subscription charge for the service ranging from $20 a month to just over $200 a year and the phone plus software costs $80 at the time of writing. Much more information on this service is available at the site.

This is a non-profit non-commercial affair running on a low- or no budget, and it shows in the rather patchy site content and layout at the moment. It really needs the donated services of a professional web designer or two to make the information better organized and accessible. But it is a new startup and it's only been in operation for a couple of months. I'm sure if it's successful, it will find support in many places. And so it should. Given that most dementia patients who wander off don't survive, anything that may help is worth promoting.

Although I do have a very elderly relative to care for myself, I'm fortunate in that he's not suffering from any of these terrible diseases and isn't at all likely to be wandering away in the near future. However, I could personally really use something along the lines of missingkeys.com or missingglasses.com, to cope with my own senior moments;-)