Return Home Interviews for Missing Older Adults With Dementia: A Scoping Review

Introduction Persons living with dementia are at risk of becoming lost. When a person is returned home safely after a missing incident, an interview with the person or care partner may identify ways to prevent repeat incidents. It is not known if these interviews are being conducted for this population. Objectives: The purpose of this review was to understand return home interviews and whether they are being used with persons who have dementia. Methods Scholarly and grey literature were searched in 20 databases. Articles were included from any language, year, study design if they included terms resembling “return home interview”, “missing,” “lost,” or “runaway”. Results Eleven articles in scholarly, and 94 in grey literature sources were included, most from the United Kingdom. The majority of academic (55%) and grey (61%) articles were related to missing children, and none were specifically about persons living with dementia. Interviews were typically conducted within 72 hours after a missing person was returned, and by police or charitable organizations. The main reasons were to understand the causes of the incident and confirm the missing person’s safety, identify support needs, and to provide support to reduce repeat missing incidents. Conclusion Existing reasons for interviews can also apply to persons with dementia. This review informs future research on return home interviews. It also informs community organizations, and police services interested in adopting this practice with persons living with dementia. Evaluations would confirm if these interviews can reduce repeat incidents and help keep people with dementia safe.

Towards examining and addressing the danger of unaccompanied migrant minors going missing

The phenomenon of missing children is complex, further complicated by the specific circumstances of missing unaccompanied migrant minors. Owing to the (often forced) migration, these children have moved through different countries with diverse legislation and work practices. The international nature of these cases leads to confusion about the responsibility of different actors. Additionally, for these cases, little data are available. This article critically assesses current work practices in the EU. It also introduces a new practical solution based on empirical data from 26 international expert interviews, proposing a new alert system for missing children cases to improve the efficiency in responding to them and the international communication between stakeholders to improve the situation of missing unaccompanied migrant minors. The solution is currently in use by three organisations and has already been used in more than 85 real-life cases. It is concluded that it holds the potential to connect actors in a new, efficient way and prevent children, and unaccompanied migrant minors particularly, from falling off the grid. It is also highlighted that the situation of unaccompanied migrant minors is highly disadvantaged, and new, homogenous legislation among the EU member states that does not discriminate against the rights of migrant minors is imperative. New research should also actively involve them to better grasp their situation before and during their disappearance.

Further evidence on the extent and time course of repeat missing incidents involving children: A research note

This study examines the extent and time course of repeat missing incidents involving children. Using data from one UK police force (n = 2,251), we find (1) that the majority (65%) of missing incidents are repeats, (2) that a small group of repeatedly missing children (n = 43; 6%) account for a sizable proportion of all missing incidents (n=739, 33%) and (3) that the likelihood of a child going missing repeatedly is elevated in the weeks immediately following a previous missing incident. The implications of our findings for future research and for the prevention of missing incidents are discussed.

Agent-Based Simulation to Measure the Effectiveness of Citizen Sensing Applications—The Case of Missing Children

Citizen sensing applications need to have a number of users defined that ensures their effectiveness. This is not a straightforward task because neither the relationship between the size of the userbase or its effectiveness is easily quantified, nor is it clear which threshold for the number of users would make the application ‘effective’. This paper presents an approach for estimating the number of users needed for location-based crowdsourcing applications to work successfully, depending on the use case, the circumstances, and the criteria of success. It circumvents various issues, ethical or practical, in performing real-world controlled experiments and tackles this challenge by developing an agent-based modelling and simulation framework. This framework is tested on a specific scenario, that of missing children and the search for them. The search is performed with the contribution of citizens being made aware of the disappearance through a mobile application. The result produces an easily reconfigurable testbed for the effectiveness of citizen sensing mobile applications, allowing the study of the marginal utility of new users of the application. The resulting framework aims to be the digital twin of a real urban scenario, and it has been designed to be easily adapted and support decisions on the feasibility, evaluation, and targeting of the deployment of spatial crowdsourcing applications.

The Missing Yemeni Children Affair – How Could It Happen?

This article aims to position the phenomenon of the Missing Children within the broad context of the relations between Yemeni Jews and the hegemonic Eastern European Yishuv society, and as a continuation of institutional and social stance towards them. It is further argued that the Yishuv leadership's attitude toward the Yemenis signaled its conduct toward Mizrahi Jews in general.

Reporting missing children to the police: A qualitative exploration of the factors associated with contacting or not contacting the police

Releasing missing person appeals is common practice when someone goes missing. Despite the wide-scale usage, the understanding on appeal effectiveness remains under-researched. This article aims to identify the factors that influence the likelihood of members of the public to report a child that has gone missing to the police and requires police assistance. Participant responses ( n = 252) were qualitatively analysed identifying four factors that positively influenced the likelihood of contacting the police, and two factors that negatively influenced the likelihood of not contacting the police to report the child. Practical implications are also discussed.

Face recognition and tracking for security surveillance

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 63,407 children have gone missing in the year 2016, which makes almost 174 children go missing in India every day, out of which only 50% are ever found again. This brings up a need for an efficient solution to trace missing children. The proposed solution uses machine assistance during these search activities with face recognition technologies and can be used for essential development of applications which use CCTV footage across a camera network to identify the person lost. In our solution we use One Shot learning for face recognition to identify stranded people in places such as mass gatherings. The same technology can be used for identification of criminals across the city. The paper also talks about the tracking of people across a network of multiple non-overlapping cameras, with a feature of shifting the target tovehicle, if the target gets into one. The experimentation is performed using mobile cameras and thus, helps in monitoring actions of criminals and finding their hideout.