Neighbor Helps Lost Dementia Elderly Return Home Safely, Heartwarming Story

Damyang-gun Yongmyeon Senior and Youth Associations, Village Residents Join Search Effort

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Kim Chunsu] The good deeds of village residents who helped a dementia elderly person return home safely are giving a quiet impression.

On the 21st, Damyang-gun, Jeollanam-do announced that the Yong-myeon Senior Citizens' Association, Youth Association, and village residents actively searched for a dementia elderly person who went missing while picking chestnuts in Seonsan and safely sent them back home.

According to the county, on the 11th, when the elderly person did not return even after 4 hours since leaving home, the family reported the disappearance to the Damyang Police Station.

In response, the police station, fire station, Yong-myeon Senior Citizens' Association, Youth Association, and village residents started the search at 6:30 PM, and about 5 hours later, at around 11:30 PM, they found the dementia elderly person about 3 km away from the village and safely arranged their return home.

Although it could have been ignored as someone else's matter, the Yong-myeon Youth Association, Senior Citizens' Association, and village residents stepped forward as if it were their own parents, adding warmth to the local community.

Damyang-gun is distributing wandering elderly identification tags, implementing pre-registration systems such as fingerprints, and providing wandering detection devices free of charge to prevent missing incidents of dementia seniors and to enable quick discovery in case of disappearance.

The wandering detection device is a wristwatch-type terminal that is easy to carry. Using the Global Positioning System (GPS), if a dementia elderly person leaves a certain area, a message is sent to the registered guardian's smartphone in advance, allowing the location of the individual to be identified, which is highly effective in preventing disappearances.

Lee Byung-no, the mayor of Damyang-gun, said, “We will continue to focus our efforts on creating a safe environment from dementia through projects to prevent missing dementia elderly persons and realize rural welfare.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.