Care Alert: A Technology to Prevent Elopement

Background:  Children with ASD are at increased risk for missing incidents in which the child leaves a safe situation and goes missing in the community.  Over half of these incidents begin from the home setting.  In these incidents a child who is left temporarily unsupervised either intentionally or unintentionally slips away unnoticed and doesn't return.  Often the parent observed the child only minuter prior to the incident. Unfortunately some of these children won't be found before dying, usually due to drowning but also in vehicular accidents.  The stress of continuous vigilance is draining for parents and unrealistic in a home setting.  Currently no technologies are designed specifically to monitor a child within a home and provide immediate and direct notification to the care provider of the child's movements through the home, near exit doors, and through exit doors.  Products are particularly needed to assist parents in monitoring the child during the night while parents are sleeping. 

Objectives:  The purpose of developing CareAlert was to provide an in-home monitoring system that could be used to monitor an individual with cogntive impairment.  Additionally the purpose of this project was to utilize scientific methods to test the acceptability and effectiveness of the system.

Methods:  Product development was funded with Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) awards from the National Institute of Nursing Research.  Subsequently a small business was formed to bring this product to market.

Results:  CareAlert has the following characteristics: monitors without the child wearing any devices; alarms at the site of the caregiver, not at the location of the child; easy to install and use; multiple integrated safety features to facilitate nightly activation, variable alarms depending on the severity of the situation; mobile control panel that can be used throughout the home; and self-monitoring of system health.  The system has been fully tested in persons with dementia and use resulted in an 85% reduction in nighttime events.  A pilot study has been conducted in homes of child with ASD.  In the pilot, there was strong acceptability and easy usability of the system by the parents.  Children tolerated the system well.  In the 6 families in which full 6-month data were available, there were trends toward reductions in parent nighttime awakenings which were accompanied by decreases in stress scores and better sleep quality. A full trial of the effect of CareAlert in improving child and parent sleep as well as reducing the consequence of fragmented sleep is in the planning stages.

Conclusions:  CareAlert represents a novel and tested technology designed particularly to prevent home elopements in persons with cognitive impairment.  This technology may be particularly useful in homes of children with ASD.  The technology is market ready with units being produced from the initial manufacturing tooling.  A demonstration of CareAlert will be provided.