The elderly Japanese with dementia will apply recognitional QR codes on their nails

In the Japanese city of Iruma, located in the vicinity of Tokyo, the work began to work a free system that allows you to apply special QR tags on the fingers or nails of elderly residents who may be lost on the street due to memory problems, BBC reports.

Tags-tags with an area of ​​one square centimeter are designed for scanning by police or other services. They contain information about the name, phone and address of the carrier, as well as its personal identification code. Thus, they greatly facilitate the work to return home a lost person with dementia.

Such a system is not unique in its kind - at present, for similar purposes, stickers glued to clothes, or GPS trackers, are used, but it may happen that an elderly person with dementia will go outside in other clothes or leave the tracker at home. At the same time, waterproof stickers with QR codes are applied directly to the skin or to the surface of the nail and on average are held for about two weeks, after which they are subject to replacement.

The plans for the introduction of this system in other Japanese cities are not reported.

BBC notes that the population of Japan is aging and if now the share of people aged 65 and more years is about 25%, then by 2055 this figure will reach 40%, while the total population of the country will decrease from 127 to 90 million people.