Slashdot Mirror
Japanese City Tags Elderly Dementia Sufferers With Barcodes (japantimes.co.jp)
"The Japanese city of Iruma has introduced scannable adhesive barcodes to tag fingernails of senior citizens with dementia who are prone to getting lost as a way to help concerned families find missing loved ones," writes HughPickens.com, citing this article from Japan Times:
The adhesive QR-coded seals for nails -- part of a free service launched last month and a first in the country -- measure just 1 cm (0.4 inches) in size. "Being able to attach the seals on nails is a great advantage," says a city worker. "There are already ID stickers for clothes or shoes but dementia patients are not always wearing those items." If an elderly person becomes disorientated, police will find the local city hall, its telephone number and the wearer's ID all embedded in the QR code. Japan is grappling with a rapidly aging population, with senior citizens expected to make up a whopping 40 percent of the population around 2060.
The article describes Japan as "a country where 4.8 million people aged 75 or older hold a license... Last month, police started offering discounts for noodles at local restaurants to elderly citizens who agreed to hand in their driving licenses."
The article describes Japan as "a country where 4.8 million people aged 75 or older hold a license... Last month, police started offering discounts for noodles at local restaurants to elderly citizens who agreed to hand in their driving licenses."
"And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand...."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Not when the all look the same.
Keep the whitehouse white, vote Trump & Palin 2020.
Wouldn't it be easier to chip them, like you do for cats, dogs & marmosets?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Surely it should be "disoriented" or have I been misinformated? (From "orient" meaning the East, or to find the direction East).
Spurious word endings do not beautificate your language and should be omissionated.
An adhesive bar code or QR-code on fingernails sound about as permanent as a Post It note on a cloth sleeve. A tattoo on a wrist or other visible place would be pretty permanent but the data base connected to the tattoo must be kept up to date. Another less permanent device might be an end sealed plastic wrist band containing appropriate information including perhaps a readable chip or QR-code. Maybe even an identity chip placed under the skin like those for wayward pets.
There's still the problem of dementia patients wandering away from their residence. This seems to happen fairly frequently and sometimes with tragic results. Some kind of tracking of such folks would also be nice. These are often used in the residential settings of such people, but don't work when the the patient walks away.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Because this can be done with a smartphone, I'd guess? A QR-code-based system can be implemented with nothing but typical smartphone hardware everyone already has. Also, from what I gather, the system itself isn't new, and already types of QR wearables are available, like bracelets. I think it's just the "QR-codes on the nails" that's new.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If you need a QR code to identify a weak, vulnerable, old person you probably don't have enough low cunning to succeed as a petty criminal.
The risk probably isn't entirely nonexistent; but the risks of getting confused, wandering off, and being hard to identify are likely to be rather more serious for the cognitively impaired elderly.
"Last month, police started offering discounts for noodles at local restaurants to elderly citizens who agreed to hand in their driving licenses."
Yeah, they're banking on most of the elderly forgetting about the discount...
#DeleteChrome
Many of the early commentators are missing the point.
Barcode is the direct allusion to Nazi Germany innovation of using permanent tattooed numbers to account their inmates. By the way, they have used IBM computers, leading novel technology, to keep track of inmates.
At the same time Soviets did not use codes on the bodies of their prisoners in GULAG, because they had way more prisoners and all their efforts were directed toward building weapons for WW2, not dealing with computers.
Fun stuff. Who could have thought that the nazi ideas will be implemented, treated as novel and applied towards humans. The difference between permanent tatoo and a small finger nail sticker with strong adhesive is really tiny.
Perhaps in America, but this is Japan we're talking about. Their criminal enterprise is mostly related to vice crimes (gambling, prostitution, etc.) and would probably find preying on the elderly to be shameful. Their cultural differences and very homogeneous population means that certain types of crimes are among the lowest in the world in Japan. At the same time it also leads to disproportionate amounts (relative to other first-world countries) of other types of crime like human trafficking.
or, perhaps a few pieces of FLAIR??
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
>The adhesive QR-coded seals for nails
Wut?
THE ADHESIVE QR-CODED SEALS FOR NAILS
"Last year, the Japanese government recorded relative poverty rates of 16%—defined as the share of the population living on less than half the national median income. ... ¥2m ($16,700)"
"Since Mr Abe took office in late 2012, the number of irregular workers—often earning less than half the pay of their full-time counterparts with permanent employment contracts—has jumped by over 1.5m. Casual and part-time employees number nearly 20m, almost 40% of the Japanese workforce."
In the US we'd never do anything like that. We're Christians ! We have Morals !
Instead people will be told that, to better serve them and to keep medical costs down, all medicare recipients will be offered a chance to enroll in a programme that offers them expedited ambulance transport in case of accidents (they're easier to locate), emergency treatment in hospitals (because their medical data can be found more easily) plus waiver of the upcoming 1000$ a month service surcharge ... provided they consent to have an RFID chip implanted with their SSN.
Those who elect not to participate in the programme will not be eligible for expedited ambulance transport, will experience a light delay upon admission until their medical data has been found and their insurance status clarified, and will be asked to pay the service surcharge.
Net participation in the chipping program will therefore be 99%, of which 100% will be voluntary, you see?
That's how you do things !
"seal" is the Japanese word for "sticker" - it is a foreign loan word from English - it comes from the seal (sticker) that is usually found on an item you purchase. If you buy an item that comes in a box, it usually has a round adhesive sticker or similar that 'seals' the box, showing you it hasn't been opened before.