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"Senior Safety"
On-campus sexual assault is an issue that every public safety department at universities must contend with. According to a study of undergraduate students by the Archives and Pediatrics of Adolescent Medicine, 53% of women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence and the hands of their partner. However, when a women is raped on a campus, it not only harms the survivor of this horrendous crime, but leads to all women not feeling safe at school, where the rape occurred. Unfortunately, when sexual assaults happen on campus, many female students tend to live in fear that a perpetrator could be lurking around the next corner. This assertion is not hyperbolic ranting, but rather a concrete reality that women across North America undergo during their college years.
Preventing these sexual assaults and helping women feel safe at school, clearly should be a major concern for any university public safety official. To prevent these heinous crimes and to create a campus culture that allows women to feel safe, law enforcement at universities must develop and invest in the best communication tools, which can help reduce and prevent rapes from occurring under their watch. Creating an effective two-way communication system between the student body and on-campus security services will both help women feel safe at school and provide quick access to help should they feel threatened.
To prevent sexual assault and other forms of campus crimes, most universities currently use emergency light phones. Emergency light phones are land-line phones which are scattered throughout college campuses and provide students with instant direct access to on-campus security. They allow students to instantaneously contact campus security, helping to improve in school safety.
While these emergency light phones allow women to feel safe at school and prevent sexual assaults, they do not heavily implement breakthrough technologies such as smartphone technology. Therefore, these emergency phones are not nearly as effective at preventing on-campus sexual assault as they could be. More specifically, emergency light phones are land-line phones and are located in fixed-positions on campus. If a woman feels threatened on campus, depending on her location, she may not have immediate access to an emergency light phone and its communication features. This presents a serious accessibility problem to campus police and public safety officials at schools, since women may not be able to reach them adequately during an attack or times of distress.
With the high adoption rate of smartphones among college students, public safety administrators now have an opportunity to implement a more effective emergency light phone solution to prevent sexual assault. For example, Guardly, provides universities with a Safe Campus Program which effectively turns a student’s smartphone into an emergency light phone. If a woman on campus feels threatened they can use Guardly to immediately contact and communicate with on-campus security and police, regardless of their location. Guardly uses GPS, cell-tower location and wifi hotspot locations to ensure the most accurate location positioning possible with your smartphone. When you use your mobile phone to call campus police, they will not know your location. Alternatively, when someone uses a land-line emergency light phone, the on-campus security or police only have access to the location of the phone which was used.
Sexual assaults may occur in many different locations or places on campus, and may include a chase or full-scale abduction, which would mean the victim and attacker would continually change locations. These rapid location changes make it very difficult for authorities to locate the attack when an emergency light phone is used to announce the emergency incident. Guardly solves this problem because it tracks the victim’s location using their smartphone’s GPS functionality and helps campus police to locate the victim regardless of the their location. By taking advantage of mobile technology, Guardly improves in school safety and reduces the number of on-campus sexual assaults by bringing emergency light phones into the 21st century.
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Our population is aging quickly. If we use Canada as an example, seniors now make up the fastest-growing age group. In 2010, an estimated 4.8 million Canadians were 65 years of age or older, a number that is expected to double in the next 25 years to reach 10.4 million seniors by 2036.
Devastating falls in the home are the most common cause of injury among the elderly and the most expensive category of injury for the Canadian healthcare system, costing over $6.2 billion in 2004 alone.
Guardly has been adapting our new smartphone-based personal safety service into a next-generation automated emergency response system for the elderly. Our service will improve their safety and well-being and allow them to remain independent longer, while reducing the burden on long-term care facilities.
For those new to Guardly, our service instantly connects emergency victims to authorities and a trusted network of friends and family. The service combines voice conference calls, email and text messages, location tracking, and the web in efforts to decrease overall response time and ensure calls for help are quickly answered.
Next Generation Personal Emergency Response System
The Guardly Team has been working with groups like the University of Toronto’s Intelligent Assistive Technology and Systems Lab (IATSL) to adapt our new emergency communications technology and jointly develop a next-generation personal emergency response system for our aging population.
IATSL is developing ceiling mounted devices that use artificial intelligence and advanced sensing; the solution will automatically detect a fall and converse with the person to determine the type of assistance needed. If they request help or their response isn’t understood due to injury such as a stroke, the system will automatically initiate an emergency alert using Guardly to selectively notify 911, family or neighbors.
Research into aging-in-place isn’t just happening in North America. A European project called Netcarity is researching and testing technologies for the elderly.
Netcarity participants include academics, technology firms, psychologists, sociologists, care centre designers and government authorities. Their goal is to turn older peoples’ homes into supportive environments that include them in society and postpone or avoid the expensive and traumatic move into long-term care centres or nursing homes. The group recently authored a discussion paper titled “The Business of Ageing” that explores the commercial challenges and opportunities in ambient assisted living.
It’s not hard to see that the combination of Guardly with advanced sensors is a significant improvement over current systems that require a senior to remember to wear a panic button as well as be physically and mentally capable to trigger an emergency alert after being injured in a fall or from a heart attack or stroke
In the short-term, we expect to achieve positive results from several trials to be conducted at nursing homes and rehabilitation centres. However, in the long-term, we expect to see the combined Guardly/IATSL at-home patient monitoring service to become a new standard form of care for the independent aging-in-place population. True success would be defined as achieving an increase in our customers’ quality of life for a price that is less than the current standard of care for those that want to remain independent of long-term care facilities.
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It may come as a surprise that elderly abuse cases have seen a huge rise as the Boomer generation has aged passed 65 year old. In 2005, there were 160 violent incidents for every 100,000 seniors, almost 14 times lower than the rate recorded for persons aged 15 to 24 (2,317 per 100,000) according to Statistics Canada. Below, you’ll find The National Center For Elder Abuse 7 areas of abuse as well as a video titled “An Age for Justice: Confronting Elder Abuse in America”.
7 Areas of Abuse:
- Physical abuse – Any act of violence that causes pain, injury, impairment, or disease, including striking, pushing, force-feeding, and improper use of physical restraints or medication.
- Emotional or psychological abuse – Conduct that causes mental anguish including threats, verbal or nonverbal insults, isolation, and humiliation. Some legal definitions require identification of at least 10 episodes of this type of behavior within a single year to constitute abuse.
- Financial or material exploitation – Misuse of an elderly person’s money or assets for personal gain. Acts such as stealing (money, social security checks, possessions) or coercion (changing a will, assuming power of attorney) constitute financial abuse.
- Neglect – Failure of a caretaker to provide for the patient’s basic needs. As in the previous examples of abuse, neglect can be physical, emotional, or financial. Physical neglect is failure to provide eyeglasses or dentures, preventive health care, safety precautions, or hygiene. Emotional neglect includes failure to provide social stimulation (leaving an older person alone for extended periods). Financial neglect involves failure to use the resources available to restore or maintain the well-being of the aging adult.
- Sexual abuse – Nonconsensual intimate contact or exposure or any similar activity when the patient is incapable of giving consent. Family members, friends, institutional employees, and fellow patients can commit sexual abuse
- Self-neglect – Behavior in which seniors compromise their own health and safety, as when an aging adult refuses needed help with various daily activities. When the patient is deemed competent, many ethical questions arise regarding the patient’s right of autonomy and the physician’s oath of beneficence.
- Abandonment – The desertion of an elderly person by an individual who has assumed responsibility for providing care for an elder, or by a person with physical custody of an elder.
How Guardly Can Help: The victim may feel be too scared of their attacker or too helpless to alert family right away if they are being abused. Guardly can be activated discreetly at the click of a button, informing help quietly and safely. The victim can quickly conference with any combination of friends/family/authority and escribe the problem, share photographs of their injuries or even of the abuser to help rectify the issue and report their problem. Guardly’s use of different contact groups ensures that the victim will communicate with the right people at the right time if an incident were to occur. With Guardly, senior’s should feel more confident and empowered when reporting abuse and will quickly receive the safety and security they so greatly deserve.
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The safety of our seniors is an issue Guardly takes very seriously. Unfortunately, on top of health issues, seniors can often be the targets of criminal activity as well. Whether you are a senior or a son or daughter with elderly parents, please consider the following safety tips for keeping our seniors safe and secure:
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Always walk in well-lit areas especially in the evening
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If you can walk with a companion, do so.
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Carry your personal identification with you wherever you go.
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Never show off your money when out in public.
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Get to know your neighbors.
- Never open your door to a stranger until you are satisfied with their identification/credentials
- Always keep the doors to your home locked
- Have a personal security system such as Guardly in place in case of a serious emergencies
A serious issue we would like to discuss is that of elderly abuse. It may not be as apparent as full-fledged criminal assault, in fact, elderly abuse can fall under the radar and go unnoticed, especially if the senior is living at a nursing home. That said, elderly abuse can also stem from a senior’s family member or in-house caregiver. Senior’s need to be able to communicate with the proper people (be it authorities or family) if they feel they are the victims of abuse. Medline Plus defines elder abuse as doing something or failing to do something to a senior citizen that results in harm to them or puts them in danger. Harm can include financial harm, if someone is stealing from or scamming them, and danger can include the withholding of medication or food. In short, as a senior it can be easy to become a victim of abuse, so be aware of your (or your parents’) surroundings, and know when and who to alert in case an issue occurs.
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