
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 20, 1991                   TAG: 9102200198
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MALDEN, MASS.                                LENGTH: Medium

SENSOR USED TO FOIL INFANT KIDNAPPINGS

A device that got its start in stores as a weapon against shoplifters is finding its way into hospitals and nursing homes around the country, to watchguard the safety of everyone from newborn babies to Alzheimers patients.

The device is an electronic sensor, fitted into a flat disk, that sets off an alarm when it is passed through specially wired exits.

By the end of this month all newborn babies at Malden Hospital here will wear plastic bracelets equipped with the sensors from the time of birth until they go home as a protection against kidnappers.

And at the Glen Ridge Nursing Care Center, a new long-term care center on the Malden Hospital grounds, 41 Alzheimers patients now wear the bands.

Those patients, who suffer from memory loss and disorientation, often start to wander out of the hospital, said Gerald Sohn, the center's administrator.

In hospitals around the country, other bracelet systems are being used to monitor movements of patients in pediatrics, trauma, psychiatric, Alzheimers and rehabilitation wards.

Manufacturers refuse to say how many hospitals around the country have installed such systems. Robert DiLonardo of Security Tag Systems Inc., one of a handful of concerns making the devices, said his company had sold more than 300 infant abduction protection systems since it began marketing its sensor bracelets in 1988.

Electronic tags in the bracelets are tuned during manufacture to a specific frequency. When the tag passes through a gate, a transmitter beaming that frequency causes the tag to send back a signal which triggers an alarm.

Most hospitals in the past have used a system of number-coded tags worn by the mother, father and child to insure against kidnappings of infants. Nurses checked tag numbers before a child could be removed from the nursery.

But such security systems have not proved fail-safe, experts say.

From 1983 and 1990, 61 newborns were stolen by non-family members from hospitals in the United States, with more than half of them taken from their mothers' rooms, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Arlington, Va.

Most were found within hours of abduction. Four, however, are still missing.

by CNB