On April 29 Sgt. George Schifano, gave a press conference and enrolled the first two clients into the program at Cupertino City Hall. He demonstrated how the device works on land and in the air by taking it up in a helicopter.

The bracelets constantly emit low-frequency radio signals that can be tracked within a mile, even in areas that Global Positioning System and other tracking devices fail. The program has allowed 903 bracelet wearers to be successfully retrieved—all within 30 minutes.

"With GPS, if a person were to wander and go undercover or go inside a building, we'd have false readings," said Schifano, the program's coordinator for both the county and state. "This has a 100 percent success rate."

Schifano said the bracelets, which are about the size of a wristwatch, cost about $263 each and $25 per month for staffing and battery-replacement costs. But the program is entirely volunteer-run and funded by donations.

Gene Saunders, CEO of the nonprofit Project Lifesaver International, said the program started about six years ago when he worked for the police force in Chesapeake, Va. Saunders was part of a team responsible for search-and-rescue operations.

"We were starting to get more and more Alzheimer's patients," he said. "And honestly, we were not doing a great job of getting them back—some we didn't find until days later, and they were deceased. Some we found after it was too late to prevent injury."

So after some research, his team decided to try the transmitter system and received a grant from a local hospital to start a 15-month pilot program.

"The first rescue we ever did was a minute and a half," Saunders said. "For some reason, word started spreading and phone calls started coming in from all over."

Now, the program is active in 35 states. Locally, only a handful of people have been outfitted with transmitters, but Schifano said he has a list of more who will be receiving them in the following weeks.

Saratoga resident Anne Gadd heard about the April 29 press conference at which the department introduced Project Lifesaver, and knew she had to go. Gadd's 86-year-old mother, Anne Curtis, has vascular dementia and has wandered several times. So she brought her mother to the unveiling and had her outfitted with the device. She even hid with her mother to demonstrate the transmitter's effectiveness and was located within 15 minutes of hiding.

"Right now I'm up the street, I'm about three-quarters of a mile away from my mother," Gadd said by telephone about a week after the press conference. "Before, I would drag her everywhere, and she was miserable. Now, it's wonderful. She comes home, she can relax, have a snack, whatever."

Debi Snyder, program manager for the Saratoga Adult Care Center where Curtis spends her weekday mornings and early afternoons, said about two-thirds of the people enrolled at the center have Alzheimer's, many of whom wander. She said she called a few of their family members to let them know about the Lifesaver transmitters.

"Luckily we have a lot of staff here, so we can catch them," she said. "But you hear stories all the time—a lot of these people are in good physical condition and they just walk and walk and walk."

Schifano said that in addition to caregivers of older adults, parents of children with autism, Down syndrome or similar disorders would benefit from the program. But he jokingly cautioned that the bracelets are not intended to do detective work for suspicious parents and spouses.

"It's not designed for tracking kids and husbands and wives," he said. "There has to be kind of a medical nexus to it."

For more information about Project Lifesaver or to make a donation, contact Sgt. George Schifano at 408.808.4768.