Travel-pattern classifier

Martino-Saltzman and colleagues sorted locomotion into four travel patterns. Only direct travel is efficient; random, lapping, and pacing are inefficient, and it is the proportion of inefficient travel that marks wandering. Choose a pattern to see its trace and its inefficiency fraction. The traces are illustrative schematics, computed locally and not stored.

Lapping — repeated circuits of the same loop. Inefficient segments 9 of 12 = 75%. Marked wandering pattern — the inefficiency, not the amount of walking, is the marker.

Need-driven wandering model

In the need-driven model, wandering arises when a vulnerable background (neurological and spatial-cognitive loss, health, lifelong walking habit) meets an immediate proximal need (pain, boredom, a search for a person or place, needing the toilet). Neither alone produces the walking; their conjunction does. Adjust both and watch the likelihood. Values are computed locally and not stored.

Background vulnerability70
Proximal unmet need60
Background70 / 100Proximal need60 / 10042%wandering likelihood
Wandering possible — likelihood 42%. Because the two factors multiply, a high background with no proximal need (or the reverse) keeps wandering low; the clinical lever is the changeable proximal need.

Wandering-intervention explorer

Systematic reviews find little high-quality evidence for any single intervention and none for drugs, and they weigh every option against the ethical cost of restricting a person’s movement. Toggle options to see illustrative risk reduction set against restriction burden. These are teaching values ordered by the review evidence, not measured effect sizes, and are computed locally.

Risk reduction40%Restriction burden2
Estimated wandering-risk reduction 40% at a restriction burden of 2. Least-restrictive. The review evidence favors the combinations that cut risk at the lowest cost to a person’s freedom — meeting needs and designing safe space before confining or sedating.