Constructing a Search Mechanism for Dementia Patient Based on Multi-Hop Transmission Path Planning and Clustering Method

The rapid growth of the elderly population has led to an increase in the number of people with dementia. As the disease progresses, dementia patients will suffer from the abnormal phenomenon of disorientation with memory loss which will not only cause a decline in the patient’s ability to take care of themselves, but also affect their quality of life and safety. On the other hand, when this happens, the caregiver is prone to mental exhaustion, excessive stress, and regrettable events. To avoid such a serious social problem and to reduce the burden on the health care system, a good coordination mechanism needs to be established quickly and effectively. Based on Information Communication Technology, this study applies multi-hop transmission path planning and clustering technology to construct a service mechanism to assist volunteers in finding patient with dementia (PWD). It simulates the loss situation and conducts stress testing to optimize the search mechanism to achieve the goals of immediacy, accuracy, and diversity, and to ensure the effectiveness of search mechanism and enhance the quality of dementia care. Finally, in a simulated test environment, a range of 1000 × 1000 meters was established, and the coordinates of volunteers, patients with dementia, and gateways were randomly generated for verification. The results verify that this method can reduce the average path of volunteers and reduce the waste of unnecessary volunteers compared with the traditional cooperative search method.