About five months later, Mattie Shoaf - at the stage of the disease where she required full-time care - wandered away from her family at Temple Mall. Her body was discovered in a field after an extensive search conducted through the night and into the next day.

Operation Fast Track was too late to save Mattie, but there is hope others will benefit from the system that will help police more quickly locate people who may wander because of an impairment.

“It was Mattie Shoaf’s disappearance that brought it home and gave it a priority,” Detective Tammy Bracewell said.

“When a child goes missing it becomes everybody’s child. When Mattie was missing, everybody felt that. You do everything you can do,” Bracewell said.

This Monday 10 bracelets will become available to caregivers.

Dr. Alan Stevens, director of Aging and Care at Scott & White Memorial Hospital, applauds Temple Police Chief Gary O. Smith for bringing the idea to the attention of his department and his officers for bringing the technology to the city.

“I think it’s a great thing,” Stevens said. “We’re very fortunate in that very few communities in the country have actually moved to adopt this kind of technology to help caregivers. So we are very fortunate that the police department is doing this.”

Stevens says that you can think of it as having two distinctive advantages for caregivers.

“The most obvious is that if a person with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia or maybe even a child that is autistic or has some other form of developmental disorder wanders from home wearing one of these - they can be found. This is proven technology to help find a person within minutes - literally minutes.

“The second benefit is the relief of burden that it provides to the caregiver when the person they are caring for is wearing one of these devices. Caregivers have a constant worry of ‘what would happen if their loved one got away?’”

Caregiving itself is just loaded with burdens of the work of care, Stevens said. Taking care of someone on a daily basis, including getting him or her dressed, making sure they eat and supervising them, raises stress levels.

“The worrying is about seeing someone that you love being in an impaired state and the need for the kind of supervision that they are providing,” he said. “This is one way of helping reduce that burden of worry.”

There are very few technological advances that reduce the burden of worrying about care like this device does, Stevens said. “I think that is kind of a hidden benefit, or one we don’t often think of.”

Making this operation successful is important to the Temple Police Department. So important that most involved in the search for Mattie donated funds to the project. Others donated their off time to help organize fundraisers in the community.

“I know one of our concerns, as a whole, was that we wanted this program to work. We didn’t want to be something that was just here for a year, we wanted to be sure it was here forever,” Temple Detective Tammy Bracewell said. “To make sure this happens we really had to have all our ducks in a row. We had to make sure we had all the legalities covered. We needed to make sure the training was right. We have everything we need, but it is new to our city.”

With a new project comes new problems, some of which may not be discovered until it is up and running on Monday.

“We have no idea what the city’s needs are,” Teston said. “We have 10 units ready to go but we may have 20 phone calls, or we may get two. There is just no way to judge.”

If 20 phone calls are received, a waiting list will be started, and requests will be filled as soon as possible.

“We are ready to go,” Teston said. “We have a dedicated phone number for initial requests and an over-the-phone screening questionnaire. Training has been completed within the department.”

The phone number to call is 298-5999. Teston asks that people leave a name and number if the call is not answered. “We will return every single phone call we get,” he said.

Clint Gray of Care Trak International provided training.

“Temple is fortunate to have dedicated cops. That team was great to train. Enthusiasm was high,” Gray said.

Gray placed transmitters all over the city and officers had to use the antenna to find them. “On average it took an officer about 22 minutes to find one,” he said.

The only information the officers were given was the last place the transmitter was seen, just like the phone call they may receive in the future.

Teston said the program will continue to be dependent on donations because it is not city-run.

“We still need the public’s support. Especially if we see that the need is much higher than we anticipate.”

Each unit - transmitter, battery and receiver - costs about $300. The cost of a battery is about $8 a month.

If people want to collect money in their office to get a transmitter out or even make a donation to replace a battery they can. “Every dollar we get helps,” Bracewell said.