“Occasionally people slip out the front door and then they wander.”
That was the problem facing a senior center in Germany. Their patients, afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, would walk away in a desperate search for a reality that only exists in their heads. The story is told in fifteen minutes on an episode of the Radio Lab podcast:
“He sat on an advisory board at the senior center. And one day he came up with this idea. It’s one of these ideas that’s so out there and yet so simple that you think it just couldn’t possibly work.”
Install a bus stop. Or, more appropriately, a fake bus stop. That’s all it took to stop the wandering patients and give the staff a chance to notice they’ve slipped away.
Do you have a recurring problem with your website, business, or personal life? Perhaps you need a fake bus stop, something that works with the other party rather than against them… and still ends up giving everyone what they want.
How exactly does this work? What happens when they see the bus stop? Does it work for patients that drove a car their whole lives?
(I’m too lazy to listen to radio lab) 🙂
-Jordan
I think it would work for someone who drove a car, too. When the patients get confused about where they are, they want to get back to the life they remember as fast as possible. They don’t have a car, so the bus seems like the next best thing.