"My mum has dementia and is prone to wandering. I just need to know she's safe."
We can help. Whether you are caring for someone with Alzheimer's or other dementia, an autistic person, someone with epilepsy, disabled kids, even those prone to sleepwalking or other wandering, we provide a small, battery operated, discrete tracking device that has been designed specifically for consensual personal location tracking. It incorporates a single-button personal, wireless panic alarm that automatically tells you exactly where the person is.
Dementia carers are particularly keen on this technology because it allows everyone to relax a little, safe in the knowledge the wandering person can be found if they get lost and they can call for help using the panic alarm if they need it. Someone prone to sleep walking knows they will be safe all night.
“The tracker is brill!!!!!!!!! I'm so glad I found it. With the tracker Martin has his freedom. i came home before Christmas to check on my husband to find he had gone out. On goes the computer and I can see where he is - a friend had taken him to buy a Christmas present for me, thinking I was out carol singing!! It works!” Rosemary
Disability officers like it too simply because no other disabled aid or piece of disabled equipment does what a GPS tracker does: provide a panic alarm that will work at any distance along with accurate location tracking. As an aid to independent living for people who want to get out a little more, it's an invaluable help.
Popular in elderly care, our location tracking device and panic alarm can help in many cases where someone is active enough to wander or sleep walk, but perhaps gets confused or lost (those with Alzheimer's for instance). Or perhaps they would simply feel safer and more able to go wandering around the shops if they could summon help with a panic alarm if they needed it. You may even set up the system so the panic alarm is simply a call to be picked up, and you can see exactly where the person is.
The person simply wears our small BlueRanger tracking device to enable you to monitor their location in real-time using an ordinary PC, with accuracy as fine as four metres. If they go beyond a boundary that you set, whether that's the end of the garden, or beyond the shopping centre, you can receive an alert (either to your phone or by email as well as on screen) and you can see exactly where they are on a map displayed on your computer.
BlueRanger is used by people caring for family members as well as in care homes and other professional situations. Professional carers (eg. a district nurse, physiotherapist or occupational therapist) may be provided with BlueRanger location devices too so that their safety can be monitored as they work with people in the community. Of course, that provides all staff with a panic alarm that also provides their exact location when activated.
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Autistic Boy Struck By Vehicle After Wandering onto Freeway
Autismvox.com: 6 September 2006: A nine-year-old autistic boy wandered onto the onramp of a freeway in El Monte, California, and was struck by a vehicle about 1.45am on Wednesday morning, as reported by ABC7.com news. Police had just left the boy’s house and spoken to his parents, who had reported him missing; the driver of the vehicle stopped and notified authorities. The boy suffered a broken arm and a cut to his head and was treated at a hospital.
How does BlueRanger work?
BlueRanger frees you from worry about where your parent with Alzheimer's or your autistic child or anyone else in your care has wandered to. If they are sleepwalking, this will help you get a good night's rest. Simply set up a boundary and the system will alert you if they wander off, start sleep walking or if they press the alarm button for assistance.
We call the small, credit card sized device that the person wears, BlueRanger. BlueMap is the software you need to install on your computer that shows you the location of the BlueRanger device.
The first thing to do when you receive your BlueRanger is to charge its batteries. It's battery operated, and charges using a wall adapter that we provide.
Then install BlueMap on an Internet connected Windows PC, which just means inserting the CD and following the onscreen instructions. Once you've done that, you can enter the names and email and/or mobile phone details of anyone involved in the care of the person concerned.
Then if you want, for instance, to set up a geographic boundary (that's called a geofence), you would look on BlueMap, find where you are on the maps it provides, and draw your geofence.
Having done that, an alert will be generated when the person wearing the BlueRanger GPS tracking unit steps outside that boundary. You need to set up the people who will receive that alert, and whether they want it by email or text message to their mobile phone.
Switch your BlueRanger on.
Get a responsible person to wear it and ask them to wander outside, perhaps beyond your boundary. You'll be able to watch their progress onscreen and when they cross the boundary you'll receive your alert.
You can set up as many boundaries as you like, and alert as many people as you like in all sorts of combinations.
GPS tracking increasing for dementia patients says survey
StaffNurse.com: Thursday 24 May 2007: Robots and GPS tracking for dementia patients are amongst the hi-tech gadgets making a difference to health care in Britain, according to a survey yesterday.
Dozens of innovations have made an impact on different areas of treatment, according to the department of health, which announced it was having a "hi tech healthcare week".
These include the robot drug dispensing system at Charing Cross Hospital. This is credited with reducing dispensing errors from 2.7 per cent to less than one per cent.
The tracking system for dementia patients uses GPS and the web to enable relatives and carers to find missing patients.
Day to day operation
Once you've set up your BlueMap software and found a way to get the person in your care to wear the BlueRanger device, they are free to enjoy their day and you to get on with yours.
At home or in the office on your PC, you get to see where they are on an on-screen map .. asleep in the chair or halfway across town.
If you set up a boundary around the shops and the route to and from them, you'll get an alert if they wander off. You can even receive an alert if they remove their BlueRanger so you know it's not being worn.
The Blue Tree difference: the problem with mobile phone tracking systems
Our product is very much ahead of the market, and if you are to be safe it's crucial to understand what you are buying. If you've looked around you will have seen mobile tracking devices which locate a mobile phone. You can use that method to locate a BlueRanger too.
But there are two huge problems with mobile phone tracking systems. You have to send a text (perhaps 20p a time) to request the position of the unit. If the target phone is out of signal area, which can happen frequently, what you receive back is either a message to say the phone can't be found, or the approximate location where the phone was last used to make a call or send a text. With Blue Tree Services information is provided real-time not on request. This forms a breadcrumb trail on your screen. If the person happens to go out of reach of a signal, at least you can see where the signal was dropped, when, and which direction they were headed, and as soon as our tracker picks up a signal again, their new location is displayed.
Secondly, what you get back from a mobile phone tracking system almost always gives you a large area to search. A real example of this: "George is within 400 metres of Kings Cross Railway Station". An average car is 4 metres long, so next time you are out and you see a line of parked cars, count a hundred of them. Then think of that as a radius, so think how difficult it would be to find George if he could be 100 cars away in any direction, in any of the buildings. Then imagine you're in a busy shopping centre, airport, or railway station .. exactly the sort of place when you might lose George. When you need to find someone, texting every five minutes and waiting for a text response containing that sort of information isn't very helpful.
The service level of text messaging is also an issue. If you try to send a Happy New Year text at midnight on new year's eve, it's likely to arrive sometime the next afternoon. There is no guarantee that a text message will be sent or responded to in a timely manner.
With BlueRanger, if SMS alerts don't reach you, you will still be able to track position using BlueMap in real-time with normal accuracy of within 4 metres, and you'll also see direction and speed of travel.
Emergency operation
There are two main emergency situations: when the BlueRanger wearer presses the alert button, and when the BlueRanger exceeds a boundary (although you might also define "not being worn" as an emergency too).
In response, you can monitor the location of the BlueRanger unit onscreen and perhaps direct someone on the ground, verbally, using a mobile phone.
If you need to be on the ground yourself or if you are panicked and can't work the software, our emergency operator is here to help. They can see the location of the person in your care. Call them and they will talk you through the process. When you sign up, you'll receive a dedicated emergency phone number that's operational all day every day.
If you wish, you might also like to purchase a BlueMap PDA which would allow you to walk or drive yourself to find your wanderer using a hand-held unit that displays where you are in relation to each other (although to stay within the law while driving you probably would have to park each time before using the BlueMap PDA this way, but you can get yourself close, park, and continue on foot). More on that later.
BlueRanger must have a connection to the mobile network in order for any alert method to work. We currently use Orange to provide mobile services, their coverage map is here. The system is designed as a person location device with the assumption that you are unlikely to let your elderly relative go wandering around unsupervised in the Cairngorms. If you are walking on the hills you would need a phone signal anyway to raise help, our system provides location data as soon as a connection is established, so no watching for a momentary icon on your phone and then being unable to connect for long enough to say .. what .. "I'm stuck somewhere on the south side of Ben Macdhui"? With BlueRanger, you can tell the emergency services exactly where your loved one is, regardless of visibility.
How it really works
BlueRanger is a GPS device (and KoolTrax™ requires your mobile phone to have GPS). That means it uses radio signals from military satellites to discover its position anywhere on earth to within 4 metres. Your in-car SatNav system does the same thing.
BlueRanger is also connected to the mobile phone network. Assuming your tracking device can get a phone signal, it transmits its location (and if it's a BlueRanger, along with some other exciting data such as whether it's being worn) to our server.
The BlueMap software on your computer talks over the Internet to our server to get the position of your GPS tracking unit, and then it displays where your person is onscreen for you. We currently use Google Maps (but reserve the right to change that without notice), so you can see the location as a road map, as an archive satellite image, or both.
If you are not familiar with Google Maps, enter your postcode here. By default you see the map view, but there's a button for 'satellite', and 'hybrid'. Some areas have stunning high quality satellite images, some only lower quality, but we think Google will bring high quality to all as soon as it is able.
Just to be clear, these are NOT 'live' satellite images, you will not be able to actually see your client, child, parent or employee walking down the street using this system. These are archive satellite images taken weeks, months or years ago.
We take Google Maps and overlay our symbols to show the location of your GPS tracking units. If you have more BlueRanger or KoolTrax™ units, it can display the location of all of them.
BlueRanger uses the very latest SiRFstar III GPS chip and the best active GPS aerial, so you get the most accurate position data, and much improved positional fixes when the BlueRanger is indoors.
What about signal strength and reliability?
GPS devices need to be able to sense the satellites that allow them to discover their position. Traditionally this is more difficult inside a large building or very built-up area, however our use of the best GPS components in BlueRanger minimises this.
We show our confidence in a position using a circle. The larger the circle, the lower our confidence, the larger the area to search. This is very rarely more than a few metres.
In the rare event that BlueRanger cannot calculate its position, or cannot transmit it through the mobile phone network, you still have a breadcrumb trail on screen which shows last position and direction of travel. BlueRanger is connected live to our server, so as soon as the signal is picked up again, your BlueMap software displays it. In this, unusual, situation, what you do know is that the person entered a particular building or poor signal area and hasn't come out. This is in contrast to competing products where you pay to send a text message that would return a "can't find them" message, leaving you to pay to re-send repeatedly.
Our server has an uptime of 99.99%. Occasional essential maintenance is undertaken at the quietest times.
BlueRanger has intelligent power management, so it reduces the number of times it calculates and sends its position as it runs low on power. We ran one down over two weeks and it continued to work, but was only able to send position data every hour. You can see the unit's power status on your BlueMap display, and there is a low battery alert.
Teen 'sleepwalks to top of crane'
BBC News: Wednesday 6 July, 2006: A teenage sleepwalker was rescued after being found asleep on the arm of a 130ft crane, police have revealed.
Police and firefighters were called to a building site in south east London, after a passer-by spotted the girl.The unnamed 15-year-old had apparently left her home near the site, climbed the crane and walked across a narrow beam while remaining fast asleep.
The girl was rescued unharmed in the incident which happened on 25 June but has only just been revealed by police.
How much does a BlueRanger cost?
We have worked hard to provide a service that enables you to budget for the costs involved.
You can buy a BlueRanger unit for £299.00 including normal data for a year (plus £10.00 postage and packing). BlueRanger transmits its location data over a mobile phone link, so in the second and subsequent years there is an annual service charge of £60.
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In unusual circumstances you may incur some additional charges.
- BlueRanger is not, by default, set up to work outside the UK or Ireland. If you wish to use it, for instance, on holiday, you would need to call us and agree to pay the roaming charges set by the mobile phone company (plus 10% to cover administration), just as you would in order to use your mobile phone abroad.
- If you set up lots of SMS alerts, and alert states keep occurring, you might pass our limit of 50 SMS alerts per month. We will then charge 25p per additional SMS alert. We will try to let you know before that happens, but it's simply a matter of you managing your alerts well. No-one has yet passed this limit nor incurred any charges, it's really there to limit our liability if someone does set things up that way.
- If you need technical support, calling our technical helpline is chargeable at 75p per minute.
You may wish to purchase just one BlueRanger to begin with, and pass it around according to the day's plan. We simply track the BlueRanger unit.
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Does it work outside the UK and Ireland?
BlueRanger is sold in the UK and Ireland set up to work in your country, but it does work in other countries, you simply have to let us know beforehand, and agree to pay the roaming charges from the mobile phone company (plus 10% to cover administration).
How can I cancel?
If you change your mind and wish to cancel a new order, you have a statutory seven days to do so. You must let us know in writing or by email and return the product unopened, uninstalled and at your expense.
For data, 12 months is the minimum term. There is no obligation to continue to purchase data services, but the unit won't be useful without it.
Guarantee
We want you to be completely satisfied with purchase, and we are absolutely sure you will be. You're going to love what we offer, so we want to make sure you get the chance to see what we mean, and feel the product working for you. So we offer an iron clad, no-quibble, fourteen day money back guarantee.
So that's that: if, after fourteen days of use, you're not absolutely happy with the BlueMap software on your PC or with your chosen tracking unit or with anything at all that we've provided for whatever reason, just return it to us in its original condition, and we'll refund your money in full. No questions asked. No hard feelings. No problem.
What you will get when you order BlueRanger
| BlueRanger | |
|---|---|
| A wearable BlueRanger unit | √ |
| A wall charger (the unit has integral batteries) | √ |
| A user manual | √ |
| A BlueMap management software CD | √ |
| Access to our technical support line (business hours only) | √ |
| History/breadcrumb trail capability | √ |
| Panic alert button | enabled |
| Knock alert facility (being worn/fall alarm) | √ |
| Boundary inside alert capability | √ |
| Boundary outside alert capability | √ |
| Multiple BlueMap logins | √ |
| Multiple contacts for alerts | √ |
| Multiple groups for alerts | √ |
| Access to our 24 hour emergency line | √ |
| International roaming | on request |
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What you need
In order to use BlueMap software to manage the service and track the position of the person wearing your BlueRanger unit, you will need an Internet connected Windows PC.
Track your BlueRanger while you are mobile too, using the BlueMap PDA
The BlueMap PDA is an optional fully featured Personal Digital Assistant running BlueMap software, so you can see onscreen the relative positions of you and the person wearing a Blue Tree Services tracker together with the direction of travel. To find them, you just travel or walk towards them. We haven't seen this capability anywhere else.
It's also a fully functioning PDA. We are currently using the Mio A701, so it gives you satnav, it's a phone, camera, video and audio player, and comes with Microsoft Office mobile, a calendar, contacts list and much more. So now you have a great reason to get a gorgeous, state of the art PDA.
BlueRanger works well without the BlueMap PDA, but with it, finding an errant runaway is fast and easy, and if, during a search, you still have someone watching BlueMap on your home computer, they can see the relative positions of both units.
Our price for the BlueMap PDA is £351.33 + £10.00 per order for p&p. You have a choice regarding the data charges. You may buy a BlueMap PDA and put your own phone sim into it, so you keep your number and contacts and you pay for the data charges through your existing phone contract. Or you can buy a new sim from us at £141 per year.
All BlueMap (parent or manager) units are able to track more than one BlueRanger (child or client) unit at no additional cost.
What you are getting
A single BlueRanger unit gives you:
- the ability to track the position of anyone in your care in real time with 4 metre accuracy
- real time location data with 4 metre positional accuracy
- a breadcrumb trail of where they have been
- the security of knowing your child, parent, client or staff member has an alert button that, when pressed, shows you exactly where they are
- emergency telephone assistance
- the ability to set up a "not being worn" alarm
- control of the setup of any number of geofence boundaries of any shape, that you can switch between at will
- the ability to set up alerts by email and/or text message to any number of people
How to order a BlueRanger
Are you ready to give a little freedom, while giving yourself the reassurance they are safe? BlueRanger is in stock now.
BlueRanger
Click the 'buy' button below to buy a single BlueRanger unit through our secure payment pages. If you want more than one, click the button and change the quantity on the next page.
| Buy |
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Purchasing the BlueMap PDA and quantities of BlueRanger
If you wish to purchase one or more BlueMap PDAs and/or more than one full BlueRanger, please use this form. Remember to click 'recalc' before pressing 'buy now'.
If you wish to combine KoolTrax™ with BlueRangers, please place two separate orders.
Product prices are shown here excluding postage and packing (p&p) at £10.00 per order.
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What happens after I've bought?
Software products are immediately downloadable along with instructions for installation. You will require an activation code from us which is dispatched by humans so please allow a business day.
For physical products, we currently try to ship every Tuesday by Parcel Post, so if you order by mid-day on a Tuesday you are likely to receive it next day. If you order on a Wednesday it will be just over a week.
When you receive your parcel, if you have BlueRangers, set them charging.
You will be asked to agree to our terms and conditions and to request the unit be activated. Privacy laws require this step.
Once you've done that, we send you a login code. You install BlueMap software on your PC, enter the login, turn on the BlueRanger and you will see its position on your screen. Well done, you're tracking!
Set up boundaries using BlueMap software by drawing them on an on-screen map, and enter the details of who is to receive alerts, under what circumstances, and by which method (email/SMS).
Next step: enjoy tracking your loved ones and knowing they are safe
Worry less about the people you love, give yourselves the means to be safe. Click here