LAS VEGAS DAY04 - Atria Seniors Living talk, Swag raiding and Lego Shop
Today, I pretty much felt so overwhelmed by the activities from the day before that I cancelled a lot of the convention activities that I originally planned to do. It was a good decision though. I felt I had a good day.
Breakfast at the Venetian
As usual, the first activity of the day is to grab breakfast.
The High Roller (view from my hotel lift lobby)
Got some time before next session so...
ALX101 | Atria Senior Living is empowering older adults with the power of voice RESERVED
Wynn | Upper Level | Cristal 7 | 1030 - 1130
Speakers: Chris Nall, Atria Senior Living | Stefania Sharp, Alexa Smart Properties
Synopsis
In this session, learn how Atria Senior Living is collaborating with Amazon Alexa, AWS, and Aiva Health to develop customized, industry-leading Alexa experiences tailored to the unique needs of older adults in senior living communities. This session follows the Atria journey from their initial vision for an integrated community assistant to being a first adopter of digital signage with Amazon Echo devices in their properties, connecting residents and loved ones with WebRTC-powered Alexa, providing application communications backed by AWS, and deploying Echo devices at scale.
Takeaways:
- Technology can be used to help Seniors be more connected to their communities.
- Technology can be used to address seemingly minor issues (such as asking when the mail arrives). Being able to handle these frees up the Care Providers to do more, leading to better well being for them too.
- To encourage Seniors to adopt technology, approaches that are sensitive to the Senior's requirements always work better.
- Voice is intuitive as some capabilities such as reading have become compromised in old age.
- Keeping a Senior engaged and updated with technology helps them feel more connected to their communities, and encourages them to participate.
How do you keep Seniors updated on technology, engaged, and help them keep in touch with their communities? How to you support Seniors to age gracefully? How do you help Seniors plug into community and technology?
Introduction to Atria Senior Living...
And Alexa Smart Properties.
Many seniors that are isolated from community suffer loneliness
73 million boomers will retire soon and there is a workforce shortage to help with their care. Even if staff can be hired, turnover is high due to burnout
Simple use cases such as
using an AI assistant to answer simple questions like “Has the mail arrived?” can be addressed through the use of technology.
Speaker mentioned that Seniors ask that question a lot.
Key use cases address simple, frequent questions such as “What is for breakfast?” or “What activities are there today?”
If Senior isn’t feeling feel, the AI assistant can help to cancel their activity.
Seniors LOVE paper but this creates a lot of time wasted for the care providers to do this paper work (e.g. physical activity calendar printing and updating)
Reminders flash on the screen to help a Senior remember things.
Alexa is also capable of controlling lights and blinds.
Designed tech solution must consider that some seniors have limited mobility and poor eyesight. This makes it difficult for them to pick up the phone, or read something on a small screen.
The Atria team consults with the Seniors to understand their use case better.
Low wifi adoption can be a problem in scaling this implementation
50 mins set-up time multiplied by 200 rooms is extremely painful for the installer.
Atria sought to reduce this time to 5 mins onsite set-up as most of the work has already been done back-end at the depot (e.g. configuration)
Letting Seniors know that they
will be getting a device helps to reduce their fear of technology
They also choose a trusted adviser (site champions) to help ease the fear that Seniors have of technology. They soft sell it as an engagement device, not a spying tool.
They use the device to welcome new Seniors that move into the community
They also talk to the Senior’s adult children to get buy-in. For example, by explaining that their contact is already preloaded onto the device, making it easy to call mum/dad
You can remove the utterance rules (no need to say “Alexa! Could you …”) for commonly used phrases
Example use cases – They use it to update the Seniors on the status of the boiler repair, or inform them of fire drills.
It also can be used to talk to external parties such as doctors and their adult children, reducing the incidence of seniors using emergency communication devices for non-emergencies
Voice is intuitive as some capabilities such as reading have become compromised in old age.
Atria tries to use tech that is
not intrusive (described as badging them on a cruise ship)
Empowering Residents and Staff at Atria Senior Living. This YouTube video was shown during the session
50% - 70% increase in community participation after the introduction of these devices. It helps them get out of their rooms and be engaged.
There are also unintended (good) consequences. For example, the senior community staff feel 20% happier than places with no Alexa. They use Alexa to cheers seniors up by playing their favourite song.
They can also use Alexa to do surveys (no QR scan surveys)
Passive nudging is always preferred instead of being forcefully pushed to the Seniors.
No Mother tongue languages available as yet.
Lego Store
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