 Wandering or getting lost is common among people with dementia. This behavior can happen at any stage of Alzheimer's. If your loved one has Alzheimer's, he or she is at risk of getting lost — even if he or she has never wandered in the past. Understand Wandering There are many reasons why a person who has Alzheimer's might wander, including:
Prevent Wandering Wandering is not necessarily harmful if it occurs in a safe and controlled environment. However, wandering can pose safety issues. To prevent unsafe wandering identify why the wandering might be happening. For example, if your loved one tends to wander at the same time every day or when he or she is bored, plan meaningful activities to keep him or her better engaged. If your loved one is searching for a spouse or child, post a sign stating that the person in question will be visiting soon to provide reassurance and reduce wandering.It's not always possible to prevent wandering. To keep your loved one safe:
Ensure a Safe Return Wanderers who get lost can be difficult to find because they often react unpredictably. For example, they might not call for help or respond to searchers' calls. Once found, wanderers might not remember their names or where they live. If you're concerned about your loved one's wandering, contact BLACKRIDGE Solutions to find out more about the PAL Wandering Prevention System. With over 4,000 sold throughout North America, it's making a difference in keeping our loved ones safe! info@blackridgesolutions.com | (778) 686-5799 
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 More people work alone than you think. Berg Insight reports there are a whopping 53 million lone workers in Canada, the United States and Europe combined. That’s about 15 percent of the overall workforce. Regarding global numbers, International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that approximately 1.3 billion people are mobile workers, many of which work alone continuously or at various times throughout their workday. Some of your team members may work in remote areas of the world, be isolated outdoors or face hazardous conditions. Others may be driving alone or to remote locations. Lone workers face many risks every day—in fact, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates 2.3 million work-related fatalities occur each year due to accidents, injuries and diseases. You are responsible for your employee’s safety and well being on the job. Are you doing everything possible to protect the safety of your organization’s most valuable assets - your employees? While many lone worker roles are obvious, others may not be as clear. Here we take a look at lone working situations, including those in indoor, outdoor, remote locations and driving conditions. Your employees should never feel they are working alone: Indoors Whether your teams are working inside on large skyscraper construction sites, underground in water treatment plants or even in warehouses, laboratories or medical centers, being accountable for the safety of all personnel, in real-time, can be a challenge. Even though other crew members may be nearby, there are often times when your employees truly are alone, out of sight and out of earshot. For example, in a large construction site, your employees may be required to work on a task in a room segregated from where the majority of the work is being completed, or may be required to scale up a level to complete an installation or to reinforce part of the structure. If colleagues can’t see or hear one of your team members and they are injured on the job, emergency response may be required and management needs to be advised. Outdoors From logging and mine sites to power plants and oilfields, many employees work outdoors and are required to perform their duties regardless of environmental conditions. In these locations, there’s often only a single worker at a particular site for extended periods of time. This poses many risks for the employee as he or she may suffer fatigue, electrocution or be struck-by moving objects and become unable to ask for help. With unpredictable weather, emergency response may be delayed, so the sooner you are aware of an incident, the better the outcome can be for your employee. Driving Some of your team members venture out for long hauls or drive to and from the work site. Road conditions can be unreliable, and when combined with fatigue after a long day of work or extended shifts, driving can be dangerous. You’re responsible for their safety, even if it’s a health incident that’s looming. Should a vehicular collision occur where a truck or long-haul flips and renders the driver unconscious, your employee may require emergency assistance, where time is of the essence. Remote Some of your employees may work in the most isolated areas you can dream of, where satellite coverage is the only way to connect. Your land survey crews may be in the mountains, biologists in boats conducting research on the rivers, up North, or operators in the oilfield going about their rounds. Falling into the water or off of a powerline can render your employee injured or unconscious. Working alone is a risk - even in locations where help is nearby, but the fastest emergency response possible to a downed engineer or crew member can make the difference between a life saved and a life lost in the most remote reaches of our planet. Regardless as to whether your lone workers operate indoors, outdoors, while driving or in remote locations, the above situations may be lone worker scenarios you have not considered before. But you are now, right? To learn more about the latest lone worker safety technology, contact Blackridge Solutions at (778) 686-5799 or info@blackridgesolutions.com. Their Safety Experts will help you determine the best lone worker safety solution for your work environment.
 When it comes to an employee’s safety while working alone, it is critical that the safety equipment they are provided with has been tested in advance to ensure it will work when it is needed … during an emergency! Blackridge Solutions has made available a “Try It Before You Buy It” program that will allow enterprise customers the opportunity to test out the leading work alone safety solutions prior to deploying them within their organizations. This will allow customers the opportunity to ensure that alert notifications (Emergency, Silent, No Motion, Fall Detection and Missed Check-In) will be successfully delivered whenever and wherever the employee is …. inside/outside cell coverage and inside/outside buildings. From the award winning Loner product line to the inReach SE satellite communicator, Blackridge Solutions has a lone worker safety device that will meet and exceed your safety requirements and ensure your employees end their shifts safely. Click Here to reserve the device of your choice or contact Blackridge Solutions at: (778) 686-5799 or info@blackridgesolutions.com
 Every day people go to work with the expectation that they will get home safely at the end of the day. To meet these expectations, businesses deploy various techniques and equipment to help keep their employees safe and healthy such as providing training or mandating the use of personal protective equipment. While many of these methods have improved safety, there are others in use almost universally that actually heighten the risk of injury or death of your employees. Using a Phone to Check-in or Monitor the Safety of Your Employees Chances are, if you have employees working alone or in isolation, you’ve made every effort to ensure that they carry a phone or smart phone at all times. While communication is the key to discovering an emergency, phones require the user to be able to see the device and dial a number. Workers who are severely injured, blinded, or incapacitated may not be capable of reaching for their phone and requesting aid manually. Responding to an Emergency as Soon as a Check-in is Missed Many businesses require their employees to check in every one or two hours. If a worker misses a check-in, managers attempt to contact the missing employee, and failing that, a search is mounted and emergency responders are contacted. The problem with this model is that an injured or distressed worker could be slumped on the ground in a field unconscious, suffering from a heart attack or stroke for as much as an hour or two before anyone even realizes that something is wrong. Those precious minutes (or hours) that are lost can mean the difference between life and death. Relying Entirely on Personal Protective Equipment No one is arguing the value of Personal ProtectiveEquipment (PPE), but relying too much on gear to prevent injuries without paying attention to the possibility that injuries can (and probably will) continue to occur can be a lethal oversight. Workers can suffer heart attacks, strokes, be overcome by gases, or suffer any number of other incidents in which PPE may not be enough to ensure that they get home safely at the end of the day. Employing a “Buddy System” to Keep Your Employees Safe If someone asked you to double the salaries of your employees with no expectation of improved productivity or safety, would you do it? Probably not - yet very often when businesses deploy buddy systems for safety, they are doing just that. Maintaining a buddy system means that your business needs to pay two people – often to do the work of one. The idea behind this type of system is that should something happen to one employee, the other one can call and request help... but what happens if both employees suffer the same incident or are rendered incapacitated? Larger events like gas leaks, explosions, and vehicular collisions can quickly render the buddy system useless. To make matters worse, buddy systems can increase complacency of workers in the field due to a false sense of greater safety. Performing a Facility Sweep to Find Injured Employees When the alarm goes up inside a facility, operations stop and every available hand is often pulled from the floor to help find the injured or distressed employee. Aside from the interruption in operations, the business spends precious time searching for the injured worker. Every minute that passes by while the searchers wander about increases the risk of a worse outcome for the employee’s health. One New Best Practice to Replace Them All Recent advances in technology have given us the key to avoiding the use of these risky techniques through automation, instant alerting, and built-in fail-safes to mitigate as much risk as possible. This evolution in safety has emerged as a “employee safety monitoring,” often known as “lone worker safety monitoring.” Utilizing automated safety monitoring devices, managers can finally discover emergency incidents right away. Unlike phones, employee safety monitoring devices are designed for one purpose – to monitor and report on the safety of your employees. These devices simplify the alerting process by eliminating the need to pull out a phone and dial a phone number, instead triggering an immediate alert in the event that a worker is rendered unconscious or suffers a slip, trip, or fall. Additionally, unlike a phone-based check-in, the check-in functionality of many of the devices will continue to monitor worker safety in between each check-in. If a worker suffers an incident, he or she won’t need to wait for the check-in timer to count down before help is sent out.Safety Managers can complement their investments in PPE by putting into place these automated alerting systems, notifying them when an emergency does occur. Receiving and responding to an emergency alert immediately can significantly improve the chances of a better outcome in the event that a piece of PPE is not enough to prevent an injury. In addition, some employee safety monitoring products include indoor location technology, allowing employers to find injured workers located within a facility with pin-point precision. This eliminates wasted time spent searching the entire facility and can not only improve the potential outcomes of injured employees, but also reduce operational down times caused by extensive facility sweeps. To find out more on the leading safety monitoring solutions available, contact Blackridge Solutions at (778) 686-5799 or info@blackridgesolutions.com 
 Loner DUO How do you improve a smartphone app that is already recognized as the best in the market for work alone safety? Answer: You add No-Motion and Fall Detection alerting capabilities to it. The Loner MOBILE app for lone worker safety from Blackridge Solutions has just introduced the Loner DUO. This commercial grade device communicates via Bluetooth technology to your smartphone (i.e.: iPhone, Android or Blackberry) to provide the user with (5) different alert scenarios: Emergency, Silent, Missed Check-In, No-Motion and Fall Detection. Its small size allows it to be easily clipped to a pocket or belt for pro-active alerting acknowledgement if the user becomes unconscious and is unable to request assistance. The alert is sent out immediately via email, text and a banner announcement is displayed on the customers secure web portal, providing the exact GPS location of where it occurred, the type of alert, who the user is and the pre-defined Emergency Response Protocol. By using Bluetooth technology, you can easily share the Loner DUO amongst many employees, thus allowing for lower cost of ownership, along with the flexibility of switching between the Loner MOBILE app for lower risk activities and pairing the Loner DUO for higher risk activities. With more employees now using smartphones, employers now have the opportunity to use their existing devices to provide a commercial grade, work alone safety solution that they can trust their employees safety with. For further information on the Loner MOBILE and Loner DUO work alone safety solution, contact Blackridge Solutions at (778) 686-5799 or info@blackridgesolutions.com
 A growing concern these days is the number of people living with Alzheimer’s, Dementia or Autism who are prone to wandering. With statistics indicating that 60% will wander at some stage and 50% who are not found with 24 hours will suffer serious injury or death, it is imperative that immediate awareness is provided when a wandering situation is occurring. A trending technology, GPS, has helped reduce wandering situations and ensure a quick and successful locate of the individual. By being able to locate the individual when they have wandered away from their residence or care facility, allowing for pinpoint locate accuracy to reduce the time and cost spent searching, also provides peace of mind to care providers and reduces the impact on emergency services personnel. Unlike current products which only provide safety while inside residences, the PAL Wandering System from Blackridge Solutions provides both indoor and outdoor protection and awareness … all in the comfort of a digital wrist watch. The watch comes with a lockable watch strap, ensuring it is always attached to the individual and not left on a table back at their residence. Using Radio Frequency (RF) technology while indoors and near a Portable Receiver, the PAL Wandering System will immediately notify care providers via text, email and web portal when the individual has left the residence and will begin tracking them using GPS technology. Their current location will be displayed on the web portal map and new GPS tracking points will be provided as quickly as every 2 minutes. Another key advantage to the PAL Wandering System is its ability to provide continued freedom to those individuals wearing it. For those who have early stages of Alzheimer’s, allowing them the ability to go out for walks or travel away from their residence knowing that if they required assistance, they have access to a Help button on the side of the watch which will signal an alert (text / email / web portal) that assistance is required and provide their exact GPS location. To find out more about the PAL Wandering System and how it is becoming a critical wandering prevention system throughout North America, click here or contact Blackridge Solutions at (778) 686-5799 or info@blackridgesolutions.com
 Have you ever had a situation when you needed a GPS tracker for a short period of time for a specific task, but didn’t want to purchase one and pay for a service plan for 12 months? Well now you have the opportunity to rent the award winning GPS trackers from Blackridge Solutions for (1) month at a time with their new Rental Program. The DART and JAVELIN provide highly accurate, real time, GPS locates, both indoors and outdoors and work in over 150 countries. With a Service Plan that provides unlimited GPS locates, the trackers automatically begin tracking every (10) seconds when the device is in motion, while also providing minute by minute background tracking when the device is stationary. Trusted by private investigators and police departments throughout the world, these GPS trackers can be used covertly, as they come with a magnetic mount, and provide a battery life of between 10 – 30 days in between charges. Contact Blackridge Solutions at (778) 686-5799 or info@blackridgesolutions.com to reserve your DART or JAVELIN today.
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