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A Japanese city has introduced a novel way to keep track of senior citizens with dementia who are prone to getting lost -- tagging their fingers and toes with scan-able barcodes.
A company in Iruma, north of Tokyo, developed tiny nail stickers, each of which carries a unique identity number to help concerned families find missing loved ones, according to the city's social welfare office.
The adhesive QR-coded seals for nails -- part of a free service launched this month and a first in Japan -- measure just one centimetre (0.4 inches) in size.
"Being able to attach the seals on nails is a great advantage," a city worker told AFP."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lost-found-japan-tags-dementia-sufferers-barcodes-093502777.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20161208171158/https://www.yahoo.com/news/lost-found-japan-tags-dementia-sufferers-barcodes-093502777.html
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @04:53AM
What a friend did is get a bunch of shirts with a QR code printed on it. Depending on what they are doing, it says slightly different things and has different codes. For example, when at school, it says something like "I am supposed to be at school, if I am not there or appear to need help, please scan the QR code. The QR code goes to a web page that describes what school he goes to, who the teacher is, and a bunch of contact numbers. When shopping with mom, it says something like "I'm out with my mother, if I appear lost or in need of help, please scan the QR code" and the code takes them to a different page with mom's number. Plus, whenever anyone goes to one of the code pages, it automatically notifies both parents and activates a tracking device they have on the kid. The nice thing is that the pages just need to be there for most days, so his employer lets them host theirs and other parents who work at the company for free on their infrastructure. One thing they are now looking into is getting their son a specially trained autism service dog.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @09:14AM
This approach is going to seriously impede the performance of big data tracking us as individuals. But it is going to be a boon for the t-shirt industry.