Essentially, the Alzheimer's patient prone to wandering is first registered through the Alzheimer's society itself, which acts as an intermediary, storing vital personal information on a police database deemed 'confidential'19 . The patient is subsequently fitted with a wrist bracelet that allows her to be tracked by police via a database containing the partient's personal information20 - for the purpose of returning her to her home- should the need arise. While the Alzheimer's society program itself does not yet use GPS technology, these means are being increasingly entertained as a more efficient way of achieving the same objectives.
The purpose of this programme, like that of assistive technologies, of course, is to help police in finding a person who has wandered21. While the objective is unquestionably laudable, at times the means employed to achieve it in actual fact are somewhat more problematic22. Even more challenging, it will be argued, is the culture of casual – even indifferent- acquiescence to these tactics23 , and our collective failure to even inquire into their appropriateness prior to consenting, as though the desire to protect the frail is somehow automatically sufficient to justify any rights infringement that the process may entail24.
The use of GPS technology to tag and track (typically elderly, typically female25 ) Alzheimer's patients raises more than a few key human rights concerns. They include potential restrictions on most fundamental rights: notably the right to liberty, privacy, potentially equality and perhaps more importantly, dignity26. While that is generally true with respect to any privacy invading technology, its use to assist the elderly is uniquely disconcerting due to society's above-mentioned tendency to gloss over the issue of seemingly abstract rights when the technology's declared purpose is "the greater good" of safeguarding the elderly (and perhaps alleviating our own burden in caring for them27).
Too often therefore, health promoting objectives relating to the elderly appear to invite an automatic nod to commercially successful new-age devices. In a word, it would seem that when it comes to the elderly, technological savvy often preempts any rights discussion, as both medical well-being and the promise of alleviating the burden of an under funded health care system28 are implicitly taken to trump liberties29.
A recent rights-based critique – a solitary voice, emanating not from a jurist but from scientific researchers in the U.K.30 - aimed to draw attention to the want of debate surrounding what would otherwise be a controversial application of new technologies31: "Our point is that we need to recognize that this new technology also involves a restriction to a person's liberty and an invasion of privacy. We need to be aware of the potential for abuse and have some safeguards" (emphasis added)32. In the absence of such awareness, GPS elder tagging may simply becomes the norm- the "reasonable" means for dealing with dementia. Taken to its logical conclusion, it stands to reason that, in the long run, failure to tag and monitor dementia patients may no longer be an option, as those who do not avail themselves of this assistive technology may themselves risk incurring liability33. Moreover, those still capable of consenting or who leave advanced directives refusing surveillance may risk being denied proper insurance coverage, deemed takers of unreasonable risk34. #p#分页标题#e#
While certain restrictions on mobility may be more readily understood (not to say condoned) in light of the 'rational objective'35 of curtailing dangerous wandering and liberating the carer from what may otherwise be 24 hour monitoring, accomplishing this goal using the 'least restrictive means' – means that less impinge on liberty or dignity- would needless to say be preferable. Again, the chief difficulty lies not in the actual use of this assistive technology but in failing to question the ethics – and indeed constitutionality – of resorting to the same technologies deployed to keep track of fugitive criminals36 those under house arrest, sexual offenders37 and wild animals (cattle, wild game). While the issue of such devices' constitutionality has – to a certain extent – been at least raised with respect to convicted sex-offenders, its application to the aged has, as noted, been characterized by an absence of serious scrutiny. The reason for this latter silence is twofold: first, as noted above, elder rights tend to be overshadowed by health concerns38 and secondly, any abuse that does ensue can generally be traced to well-meaning caregivers – not the state, thus all but precluding any such recourse39.
At this juncture, it is imperative to emphasize that the following by no means purports to even begin to grasp the entirety of the multi-facted issue respecting the ethics of tagging the elderly and others suffering from dementia. To the contrary, such an undertaking would no doubt require a multidisciplinary engagement, destined to study aspects exceeding the purely juridical perspective- insight which this author – a jurist- lacks. Instead, the purpose of this paper is quite simply to call attention to the matter in order to encourage much needed multidisciplinary study of the problem, and ignite the sort of deliberation essential to addressing a complex predicament not limited to juridical analysis40 .