PORT ORANGE, Fla. – The identification bracelets invented by Port Orange nurse Amanda Anderson promised to be revolutionary: No longer did a rubber wristband need the help of police officers to be interpreted and, thus, useful.
Now, six months after Anderson began donating her “Sharewear” to Central Florida police departments and sheriff’s offices and selling the bracelets online, are they getting results?
News 6 checked in again with Anderson, inventor of Sharewear.
Sharewear bracelets are encoded with a unique RFID code and unique QR code. Both can be read by any cell phone. Clicking on the code leads to a website that has been customized by the owner of the bracelet, often the parents of the child wearing the bracelet.
“All somebody has to do with their phone is use the NFC area on their phone which on an iPhone is right up by the camera,” Anderson said. “You click that link and it’s going to pull up the profile somebody has created. You put the discretionary information in there that you’re comfortable putting in, so if you want to put in an address you can put an address. If you don’t you leave it out.”
Anderson said she invented Sharewear to identify children or adults that may wander off and discovered parents of special needs children are also interested in the technology.
“Oh my gosh, looking back it’s been tremendous, especially just from these moms of special needs communities, children with various types of dementia or autism, just the response and gratefulness that something like this has come to market that they have needed has been enough to propel us forward to keep us going,” Anderson said. “Like children on the autism spectrum. Like if they wander or are unable to communicate their needs as we know a lot of them are non-speaking. This bracelet can hold the necessary information to reunite them with mom or dad or a teacher or somebody that is unable to communicate with them verbally but need to know that information.”
DeLand Police Chief Jason Umberger was the first in Florida to receive a donation of Sharewear. He had been researching identification bracelet techonology but had not settled on a product because all of the existing bracelets required a law enforcement officer to be present to access the information encoded in the bracelet.
“And here’s a situation where if a community member found a lost or wandering child or wandering dementia patient that had one of these bracelets, and they knew what to do with it, they could scan that and get the information and actually contact the people that are looking for the child, even without that police involvement,” Umberger said. “All of the technology that I was aware of in the past required a lot more involvement with keeping track of who had a bracelet, and even involving our dispatch center with information and the like. So this is you really unique product. So I’m very excited about it.”
Anderson has so far donated 225 Sharewear bracelets to seven law enforcement agencies in Volusia County and has plans to donate more.
Umberger said if you visit the DeLand Police Department, officers will provide you with a donated bracelet while it still has them. Deland police will also hand out bracelets at community events, free of charge.
Or you can purchase a Sharewear bracelet starting at $21 by clicking here.
Anderson said Sharewear will soon be entering phase two, adding a subscription service for any parent that wants to get an alert when a bracelet is scanned. A text message will tell the parent when and where the bracelet is scanned, presumably leading to the location of a missing child.
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