There are an estimated 80,000 Coloradans living with dementia and other cognitive disabilities that can cause them to wander away and go missing.
“If someone wanders on foot, they can be found up to one and a half, two miles from the home,” said Kelly Osthoff, the senior program director at the Alzheimer’s Association of Colorado. “It’s a major safety concern for people living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia and their care partners.”
Dementia experts say every minute they’re missing puts them at risk of injury or death.
Last year alone, Colorado sent out 63 statewide alerts for missing seniors.
Wearable tracking devices like bracelets with GPS and radio signals used to be the primary tools to find them quickly.
But in the last two years, the state has shifted most of its grant funding in its Persons Who Wander Program to a new technology that’s bringing more buzz, along with some concerns about privacy rights and the reactive nature of the devices.
This year, the state awarded seven police departments, from Routt County to Louisville, grant funds to purchase thermal drones and pay for training to fly them.
The drone purchases accounted for 75% of the $90,000 the state had available this year for the Persons Who Wander program.
Departments turning to drones say they can help quickly find vulnerable people using infrared, heat-seeking technology.
They say the drones can search wide areas in minutes that used to take officers on the ground hours to cover. Lt. Ryan Adrian of the Routt County Sheriff’s Office said their new drone will also help extend nighttime searches on places like Rabbit Ears Pass that would be too dangerous for humans.
"It's really going to cut down on time, especially if you're looking for a kid or somebody with a medical issue, or an elderly person who has dementia,” Adrian said. “Time is really going to be essential in hopefully recovering that person.”
Adrian said the drone has been deployed on one missing persons case since it was unboxed about three months ago. It helped search rural county roads near Steamboat Springs for an elderly man who went missing on a bike ride. The man was eventually found by other means in the city.
But the drone isn’t only being used to help find vulnerable people.
“We've used it on a couple warrants, like search-warrant type stuff, just to have it up above…just to provide an eye in the sky,” Adrian said. “It's definitely a multi-use thing, right? We're not going to be like, ‘oh, let's, let's leave that in the vehicle.’ If we need to use a drone, we're going to use a drone.”
Buzzing over Louisville
Scott Moore looked like he was playing a handheld video game last month as he pushed a button and fired up his department’s new drone in the parking lot of the Louisville police headquarters last month.
It lifted off and hovered high above. As he panned the camera down to a busy street, thermal images of cars populated the screen in great detail.
“These will be able to see maybe miles at this point in order to be able to track somebody down,” he said.
Moore is one of five drone pilots at the police department, which received a thermal drone from the Persons Who Wander program this year.
Deputy Police Chief Jeff Fisher said he was inspired to purchase the new drone because of a missing persons case four years ago. A 73-year-old Louisville woman disappeared on a walk and wasn’t located for 26 hours. Humans eventually found her safe but dehydrated at a bus stop.
“Every minute they're gone, we grow increasingly concerned,” Fisher said. “That's what really spawned us going, ‘man, you know, we've got to figure out how can we leverage technology to get these people back home and get them to safety or medical care or whatever they need faster?' And we're confident (the drone) is going to do that for us.”
Like Routt County, Louisville police say they’ll also use the drone for law enforcement purposes.
“If we have somebody flee from us and take off into the night or into the day, it's great for locating people under those circumstances as well,” Fisher said.
This influx of drones equipped with thermal sensors is concerning to people focused on privacy rights.
Unwanted surveillance
Anaya Robinson, the policy director for Colorado’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Colorado lacks safeguards and regulations to protect the public from unwanted drone surveillance.
While some other states around the nation have tackled the issue with statewide regulations and restrictions on police use, Colorado has not.
“Anyone who is living within the area that a drone is flying over is being surveilled,” Robinson said.
He also questions if the Persons Who Wander grant funds should be used to support general law enforcement activities.
“There’s an intention there for that money to be used for a specific purpose,” he said. “Trying to find an older adult who has wandered, who has Alzheimer's, versus trying to track down someone who has allegedly committed a crime, I think those are vastly different things.”
Prevention vs reaction
Dementia experts who help caregivers prevent loved ones from wandering say more focus should be put on stopping wandering in the first place.
Dr. Laura Gitlin of Drexel University researches home-based interventions for dementia patients. She says states should prioritize grant funds on preventative measures.
“When somebody wanders outside the home and gets lost, that’s very expensive,” she said, adding that the situation takes an emotional toll on both the wanderer and the community. “They are at risk of an injury. They are at risk of dying. So you have to look at preventative strategies.”
She said deploying drones is appropriate for those who have wandered, “but if we can prevent them from wandering, that’s where our energies should be.”
Gitlin said there are several methods to do that. Those include installing equipment at homes, like hard to reach door latches, that make it tough for a person with dementia to wander away.
“We’ve placed foot mats that have musical notes, which distracts the person as they step on it to try and leave,” she said.
A different tool
The Aurora Police Department is in Colorado’s Persons Who Wander program, too, but they didn’t use their money to buy drones. They’re purchasing stone-sized GPS tracking devices called AngelSense that can help prevent wandering by sounding an alarm if a person leaves a pre-determined boundary, like a home.
The device, which the police department is offering to qualified Aurora residents for free, locks onto a patient’s clothing.
Caregivers use their smartphones to track their loved ones in real time. They can also call their loved one and talk to them on it if the person starts to wander.
Det. Virgil Majors has delivered about 40 of the devices to families.
“It gives them the peace of mind to be able to go to places and not have to essentially have a leash on their loved one,” Majors said. “It lets them be a little bit more independent.”
Changing technology
State initiatives to find people with disabilities who wander in Colorado have evolved over the years.
In 2007, Colorado lawmakers created a grant program to encourage more law enforcement agencies to distribute wristbands that could be located with radio receivers.
At its peak, more than 30 agencies around Colorado participated.
But in 2022, advocates of the programs told lawmakers that they had called police departments around the state and found as many as half of them were no longer participating.
Colorado resident Scott Pinkney, who spent two years helping search for the remains of a friend’s wife with Alzheimer's who went missing in California, then led a push for new funding at the statehouse.
“Grant money went dry, and some law enforcement agencies couldn’t continue funding without it,” he said. “Others didn’t feel radio frequency tracker was appropriate for their community.”
So in 2022, Pinkney testified in support of the Persons Who Wander grant program, which was signed into law that year.
He said Thursday he supports the increasing use of drones in the program and the law was written deliberately to accommodate new technology beyond the radio tracker wristbands.
“It’s a greater way to cover so much of a search area than on foot or by car,” he said of drones. “The only thing I wish is that more law enforcement agencies knew about it. It’s a great program.”
