Raising Tech

Amber Bardon:
0:07

Welcome to Raising Tech. I’m your host, Amber Bardon, and today we have a special guest, Brian McWade from Sentrics. Welcome to the show.

Brian McWade:
0:14

Thanks for having me, Brian .

Amber Bardon:
0:15

So excited to have you on the podcast. I know we’ve been trying to get you on for a couple weeks now , so I’m so glad that you’re here and we’re gonna talk a little bit more about Sentrics. So to start us off, can you tell everybody a little bit about Sentrics, about your role in the company and just give us that background and that history?

Brian McWade:
0:30

Sure! So I’m the Chief Product Officer at Sentrics, responsible for overall product strategy, vision, deployment of our software and hardware solutions. Sentrics is in about 7,500 communities in North America. So we have a very large footprint when you look at companies that provide technology in the room of residents, we’re definitely one of the larger groups all of our technology is interacted with in one way or another by a resident. Personally, I have spent my whole career in senior living initially helping found Connected Living, which is a resident engagement product and helped see that through two acquisitions which brought me to Sentrics after Sentrics acquired Connected Living. So it’s been a full circle experience for me personally.

Amber Bardon:
1:08

Can you share a little bit about what the whole product suite is at Sentrics? Because I know you mentioned Connected Living and then there is Sentrics so what else is involved in that company?

Brian McWade:
1:17

Yeah, so you know, when you hear 7,500 communities you might say, wow , I haven’t really heard of Sentrics before. But that’s a lot of sites and the strategy we’ve taken is actually to acquire our growth. So we’ve looked at different industries within senior living, life safety, entertainment and engagement, and have strategically acquired companies that have been around, have strong footprints, strong retention, strong clients. So we’ve acquired seven companies since 2016 that have fallen into, you know, one of those three categories. And when you think of life safety, those are things like eCall systems and motion sensors and you know, wearable pendants that provide service for residents . On the TV and entertainment side, it’s more of your traditional phone, internet, tv, we’re the largest direct TV reseller in senior living. And then on engagement, your traditional resident engagement products. So we’re very focused on those three areas. There’s a lot within each of those products that makes them unique, but that’s the broader product line. And as we move forward, we’re bringing those three divisions together into one product.

Amber Bardon:
2:12

I think it’s a really exciting time to see what’s gonna happen with technology, especially on the resident side. I think we’re gonna start seeing a shift where residents and or family members moving in the next few years are going to start asking questions about what technology do you have to keep me safe? What technology do you have to let the community know if I fall, what do you have to monitor my activities and my vital signs and all of that. One of the biggest challenges I see with this shift to this type of technology is infrastructure and Wi-Fi. And I’m curious, what have you encountered, what are your thoughts on solutions around that? Because it can be a very expensive problem to solve.

Brian McWade:
2:46

Yeah, it’s definitely important to, as more and more residents move in when I started in this space, less than 20% of seniors had access to internet. And today I think it’s over 50% move in with a smart device they use multiple times a day . So it’s there when we look at it from our perspective, we’re deploying a lot of different technologies in the community and we want to find ways to deploy those that don’t necessarily require wireless. All of our eCall products, a lot of our other products, they run off of other bandwidth, ZigBee and Z-Wave solutions. So we don’t have to necessarily always bring in solutions that take away from the precious bandwidth the community has. We’re definitely in a position since, in addition to providing technology products, we’re also the provider of internet. So we need to be able to provide quality service, but we’re in this position of controlling our own destiny in terms of what products will work best with the internet and really monitoring usage and peak usage and how we adopted that that.

Amber Bardon:
3:35

Coming from your unique perspective as a founder of a company that was then later acquired by Sentrics and having been in this industry, what do you see are the biggest challenges facing the industry and what does Sentrics do to help solve those challenges?

Brian McWade:
3:49

Yeah, I think, you know today there’s a couple things in my mind. We talk a lot about boomers. The average age of a senior living resident right now is I believe 82. The average boomer is 78. So we haven’t even really hit the peak yet of that growth coming into the industry. You know, when the pandemic started, census went down 10% across the industry and it’s really only come back about 5%. And then the third piece is, you know, unfortunately just given our industry, a community typically turns over in about two and a half years. So you would think at this point that your census, that’s pretty much out of the pandemic, would’ve rebounded to where it was before, given how communities kind of turn over every couple years and it hasn’t. So there’s a lot of focus on cost reduction and efficiencies and how do we really identify where we’re spending our time and where we’re spending our money as an operator. So that’s a lot that we’re trying to do with the data we’re collecting is how can we make the building run more smoothly. We’re also finding from an engagement perspective that there are so many different factors that go into how people use technology, that you can’t just be a one-stop shop, you know, you need to have different ways for people to engage from signage to TV experiences, to mobile apps. You need to have the full spectrum because everyone’s coming in with a different experience.

Amber Bardon:
4:57

Let’s imagine a scenario where we’re putting a new construction and we are outfitting the community top to bottom with Sentrics’ products. What would that look like? What would that look like to the resident? What would that look like to the staff and the family ?

Brian McWade:
5:09

Sure. Well a foundational piece is definitely the life safety side we’ve done for decades. Your more traditional eCall, your wired eCall systems. Where we’re going today and where we’re investing, all of our R and D is in our RTLS platform, which is real-time location sharing. So picture your traditional eCall platforms, but wireless. Everything’s wireless. And then we put beacons and locators throughout the whole campus anywhere where you want to know and pinpoint a location rooms, different pieces of rooms, dining areas, hallways, courtyards, and we map it from a location standpoint. So on one side that gives you some more locational based insight into your emergency call system, but it starts to give you other operational efficiencies around where are my residents spending their time, where is my staff spending their time? What are my response times to to various things? So there’s a locational component that you want to build, build into your new communities because you have that Capex to do it. On the TV and engagement side, you know, we want to look at entertainment services that folks are using at home. So how do we bring in streaming services integrated set top boxes with DVR service, which we built our own set top box that is DVR driven . So how do we take some of these consumer products that people have when they’re bringing in and embed them in there. So those are some of the key pieces. And then you have obviously engagement in BYOD settings. So you want to make sure that you’re set up for however that person wants to connect with the community.

Amber Bardon:
6:29

I was just on-site with a client this week who was actively looking for the first solution you described to have that geolocation. We see a lot of clients wanting to move away from the more traditional pendants and wander guards. Does that solution also work outside? So could it cover an entire campus, including all the outdoor areas?

Brian McWade:
6:46

Yeah , so there’s two sides to it. The locators can go in or outside and it’s all location based in alert base. So you could say, you know, between 8:00 PM and 12:00 PM these three or four residents or this aggregate group cannot exit this particular area. So we’re giving a lot of flexibility to the staff to look at those alerts. And then that same type of thing could be outside, you know, no courtyard access, but we’re also deploying and continuing to develop our own, you know, cellular-base pendants that can go off campus and be more of your traditional PERS device. But instead of just being a standalone pendant to a call center, it integrates into the broader emergency call system. So now a resident can have peace of mind, not just when they’re on campus, but when they go out to the grocery store because they’re an independent living . So we’re trying to cover all those pieces depending on the demographic.

Amber Bardon:
7:29

Yeah, I think there’s gonna be a huge need for solutions like this as residents want to be more independent and more mobile and have less of that institutionalized feel to, you know, ensure their safety. One of the questions I frequently get when I talk about these types of solutions with our clients is, you know, there’s definitely a case for the monitoring and the tracking and all the life safety pieces and all the sensors, but there is concern on the community side is who’s gonna track all this data? Who’s gonna make sure it’s being responded to, it’s being looked at and then how do you use this data? So what is your approach to that side of it?

Brian McWade:
8:02

Absolutely. Well I think there’s two sides to it where we look at our business line, when you look at Sentrics, there’s dozens of products today, they’re independent product line, you’re buying emergency call, you’re buying tv, you’re buying, engage where we’re going and we’ll continue to do that and advance those products. Where we’re going is those are vehicles of collecting important information and the fact that we own these different companies, we’re in a very unique position to take a resident and to feed all the data from those product lines into a view and to do through our BI tools , business intelligent tools we have. And we’re building to do a lot of that data work for the staff so that they don’t have to say, hey, well rows and columns and all these different things and what does it mean? So you know , we’re building our enriched platform, which is built to, from a resident perspective, give that 360-degree view, but also that operator perspective provide insights based off the data that we’re collecting. So we’re trying to take that off the plate. The plate from a day-to-day perspective, the products are built for life safety. You’re gonna set up who’s getting what alerts, you’re gonna set up escalators, you’re gonna choose who gets what and who doesn’t. So we’re trying to also not have alert fatigue across all the product lines, but also make sure that the people that need it can get it. There’s a balance obviously that who’s involved and who isn’t.

Amber Bardon:
9:13

Let’s talk a little bit about the cost side of things. I’m sure the people listening to the podcast think that this all sounds really great and it’s the future, but how do communities pay for this? Is there an ROI that you can point to or has the cost replaced by another cost? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah,

Brian McWade:
9:26

Each product’s a little bit different. You know, on the emergency call life safety side, there’s typically an existing product you might have in place and there can be retrofits where you retrofit pieces or whatnot. And then in new construction it’s more of a Capex expense. But in emergency in the insure side it’s much more of an upfront investment and then there’s recurring fees for service fees depending on pendant replacements and things like that. So the pricing is very similar to what communities would be doing today with, you know, your emergency call side of things. On the entertainment side, it’s primarily how you’re paying for your TV service because we’re providing TV in bulk and we’re doing it as a large dealer, we’re able to look at pretty significant pricing differences from various carriers and the fact that we can do both. So we’re seeing $15 to $20 per room savings on your regular cable and TV programming with the fact that we can put a set top box in too . So as a niche provider in senior living, we can be a little bit more flexible than some of the big box carriers.

Amber Bardon:
10:25

Do you envision scenarios where some of these monitoring services and additional technology would just be billable à la carte or what would be the model for that?

Brian McWade:
10:35

Absolutely. So we are looking on the cellular pendant side. It doesn’t have to go through a community, it can be more of a case by case , especially in independent living. The more communities get into streaming, streaming is much more of a case-by-case basis. So we see that as à-la-carte offering where a community can offer traditional TV service or a non-volt streaming platform, you know, so I think there’ll be options on that side and a lot of flexibility. The same thing for internet. You know, we offer resident internet and that can be done on a per-resident basis since we’re the ISP for that community. So there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how it’s offered, how it’s packaged, how the community markets it, if they’re giving it for free or charging for it. So, you know , in most of these cases, especially the phone, internet and TV business, we’re giving the operator a platform for them to really decide how they want charge and pay for it.

Amber Bardon:
11:25

Brian , if a community is interested in exploring some of the solutions that Sentrics has, what would you say? What’s your top advice? What should they do to prepare? What should they know? What would be lessons learned? Things to get started,

Brian McWade:
11:38

There’s three areas that we’re trying to solve. There’s the operational efficiency, the resident experience, and you know, one that doesn’t get talked about a lot, but’s on the minds of every owner and operator is just the investor accountability, the financial accountability. So I’d like to ask our customers, our clients, our prospects, give me some examples in those three that are your biggest concerns. You know, our products touch most of the operation of a community and in one way or another we can help tie in ROI to specific things. When you look at our product line, where we’re going is we want to be able to walk into a community and say, forget about tv, internet, or phone. Here’s all of the products. You pick which ones you want, you want engagement and you want motion sensors and you want to do that because you want to provide an auto check-in for residents at events. Well , we can combine these products and do that holistically. We’re trying to break down the barriers of our product lines and just say, here’s everything, which pieces do you want? And we’ll make them work together.

Amber Bardon:
12:32

What do you see is the future? So is there anything out there that we haven’t heard of yet or that might be coming or that might be in other industries that you think is coming to senior living?

Brian McWade:
12:40

I think it’s more on, we hear a lot about data and I think it’s easy to talk about data, but there’s isn’t a lot of movement in our industry right now to provide, you know, centralized machine learning and you know, predictive and prescriptive data insights to clients and communities. We hear a lot about it. And one of the challenges with that is most of that today is done through integration. You need to integrate with the company and when you integrate your data, you only control what that company will provide to you. And when I look at what Sentrics is doing and some other companies is the more where you can be the source of truth for the data, the more impactful it can be and the more that these companies can share that together, we’ll start to have some really strong predictive insights that can help with those key things around, you know, length of stay, how we can, you know, improve the net income or the community if the Sentrics product or any product can extend the length of stay of a resident by five days, which seems little, you’re making a big impact to the operator. So I think we’re gonna see a lot of advancement in the business, intelligent tools that can be brought to market.

Amber Bardon:
13:39

Brian , thank you so much for everything you’ve shared today. Is there anything that you wanna make sure our listeners know about Sentrics that we didn’t talk about yet?

Brian McWade:
13:46

I think just the only thing I kicked it off in the beginning saying you may not know much of Sentrics, but just so you can hear some of the companies that are tied to it on the life safety side, companies like CISCOR and Silversphere to long-term emergency call companies on the TV side, companies like SeniorTV is a part of Sentrics. And then on the engagement side, companies like Connected Living. So if you’ve heard of those companies or worked with them now or in the past, they’re actually now part of Sentrics and you know, we continue to both sell those products as standalone, but really bringing them together to form Sentrics 360.

Amber Bardon:
14:19

That’s great! And if our listeners want to know more, where can they find you?

Brian McWade:
14:23

Our website is Sentrics . net. LinkedIn conferences, we attend pretty much every regional show. We’ll be at the large LeadingAge Conference in the fall, but you know, if you’re attending any conferences, look us up. If not, please reach out through the website .

Amber Bardon:
14:35

Thank you so much for joining me today, Brian . It’s been a really great conversation. Thank you.

Brian McWade:
14:39

Thank you!

Amber Bardon:
14:39

Listeners, if you have feedback on this episode or have ideas for a future podcast, you can find us on our website, www.ParasolAlliance.com. Thank you for listening!

Patrick Leonard:
0:07

Welcome back to Raising Tech, a podcast about all things technology and senior living. I’m your host, Patrick Leonard, and today we’re gonna talk about a topic we’ve highlighted on the show before, but this time we’re gonna hear about it directly from a senior living community operator and that topic is robotics and we’re gonna talk about its specific use cases in a specific senior living community. So with that, I’m excited to introduce our listeners to our guest today, who’s Marti Milligan from The Ridge Senior Living. Marti, welcome to the show.

Marti Milligan:
0:38

Thanks Patrick. It’s great to be here!

Patrick Leonard:
0:40

It’s great to have you. So Marti, before we dive into the topic today, do you mind giving our listeners just a little bit of background about yourself and your role at The Ridge as well as a little bit of background about The Ridge Senior Living itself?

Marti Milligan:
0:51

Sure. So I’ve been with The Ridge Senior living for a little over five years now. We have independent living, assisted living and memory care in Utah, the Salt Lake City area and also in the Denver metro area in Colorado.

Patrick Leonard:
1:06

Awesome, thank you for that, and so what originally sparked us having this conversation today was o ur t eam was at a conference and we learned about your c ommunity’s utilization of robotic companion pets at The Ridge Senior Living, which is super exciting and interesting, and so can you tell us a little bit more about what you’re using at The Ridge and how?

Marti Milligan:
1:29

Sure, so at The Ridge, each of our memory care neighborhoods are equipped with a sensory room and that sensory room has comfortable chairs, blankets, aromatherapy, music therapy. And we also have some more tactile therapies like our robotic pets right here. The robotic pets, we use them primarily with memory care residents, who are in that sensory phase of dementia. So, they really are able to bond with these pets. They bring them a lot of comfort. It helps to reduce agitation, and they’re actually quite lifelike.

Patrick Leonard:
2:06

Wow. Listeners that can’t see this, when we release the recording, at least we’ll have to share some video clips on social media, but we can see in your background them interacting and moving as you talk and just petted the head. It’s amazing. So back up a little bit and tell me how did you all decide to start utilizing these companion pets? You know, for my knowledge at least, I’m just learning about this technology as of late and hearing of communities utilizing it in the senior living space. But I’m always so curious how certain communities decide to make the leap to something like this and try something new and exciting like this. So can you tell us a little bit about that journey and how you decided to start utilizing these pets at your community?

Marti Milligan:
2:46

So these pets first came on my radar through Argentum. We had attended an Argentum conference a few years back and our main building in Colorado was still under construction. And so we were looking how can we incorporate technology? How can we be innovative in our approach to memory care and dementia? At the same time, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with dementia. She was about mid-stages and we placed her in a memory care neighborhood in Florida near her home. At that time we purchased one just like this guy here, it’s like a little golden retriever, golden retriever puppy and gave it to her. She was about in mid-stages of the disease process and we were amazed at how she bonded with this little animal and we would go to visit her, she would feed it, she named it, she brought it with her everywhere and it just really brought her great comfort. And when I saw that happening with somebody who meant a lot to me, I was able to kind of think, wow, I think this would help a lot of people. And so we incorporated that into our sensory rooms as we opened The Ridge Pinehurst, and then we subsequently have done sensory rooms and included these animals at our Salt Lake City locations.

Patrick Leonard:
4:08

Wow! Such a cool personal story I wasn’t aware of that kind of sparked this that makes it even more impactful, and so I noticed as you’re talking the two pets, the the cat and the dog behind you, are barking and making noises moving their head around. So, tell me a little bit about how that works . How are they sensing and why are they reacting certain ways? Did you program them a certain way? Did they come a certain way ? How does that work?

Marti Milligan:
4:29

So, they are programmed to sound and to touch. So if I come over here and I pet the top of the cat’s head, you can see she’s putting her paw up, just licking her paw. She’s probably gonna roll over here soon and so I can pet these guys, they’ll respond to it, they’ll bark or fur and it’s kind of fun. It’s impossible not to pick them up and play with them <laugh>.

Patrick Leonard:
4:52

That’s awesome and it sounds like your mother-in-law had such a great experience. How have the residents responded at The Ridge so far to interacting with them ? Are they more prevalent in , you know, with certain residents than others or how are they interacting day-to-day in the community?

Marti Milligan:
5:08

So, a lot of times it depends on the particular resident. So in particular if a resident prior to moving in had had a cat or a dog, this can spark a lot of memories for them. We provided you with a video of one of our residents who is extremely close with the cat. So sometimes she doesn’t like to give it up and share a cat with other residents. But you know, ultimately she will if you ask her if you can pet her cat. So <laugh> , these guys are just, they bring a lot of comfort. Family members are very interested in this. It can help to spark that communication with family members or friends and their loved one because it gives that memory care resident the opportunity to touch something, feel something while the family member is interacting as well. The same with caregivers. A caregiver, oh for example, needs to brush somebody’s hair and maybe that resident doesn’t like her hairbrush. We could set the cat in that resident’s lap and it gives her something to do while her hair is being brushed. That’s just one example.

Patrick Leonard:
6:07

And so how many pets do you actually have in a given community and are there other options besides the dog and cat that I’m seeing here today?

Marti Milligan:
6:17

So we only have the dog and the cat at our communities. I understand there’s a seal out there that some memory care neighborhoods are utilizing, and then the other thing is, is you can purchase these for a loved one at your home. They’re available on Amazon.

Patrick Leonard:
6:32

Awesome, okay. But are those ones that you’re actually providing the community you’re providing residents for? That’s awesome. Cool .

Marti Milligan:
6:38

Yeah , so we provide these for the community. As I said, we typically house them in our sensory room so that it’s another piece of that daily life where somebody can go into that sensory room , if they’re feeling a little overwhelmed or feeling agitated, we can put some soft music on and have them interact with the cat or the dog. I will say though, you know, the sensory room of course is open. Residents have access to it anytime they want and it’s not unusual for the cat or the dog to disappear for a little while and then we have to go on a hunt for the animal.

Patrick Leonard:
7:10

<laugh>. That is interesting. I didn’t even think about that. Do they have tracking devices on them ?

Marti Milligan:
7:15

<laugh> Not a bad idea. Maybe we should chip them <laugh>.

Patrick Leonard:
7:18

<laugh>

Marti Milligan:
7:20

Now all of our memory care neighborhoods are also pet friendly. So we do have some pets that are within those neighborhoods depending on where somebody is in the dementia process and how they’re able to care for their pet or bring in a service to healthcare for their pet. But for those who don’t have a pet anymore or have not brought their live pet with them, these are really great options .

Patrick Leonard:
7:42

And do they require just simple batteries to operate them?

Marti Milligan:
7:46

Simple batteries. They have a pouch back here to turn them on and off so that memory support residents can interact but they’re not necessarily going to find that button to turn on and off the animal.

Patrick Leonard:
7:58

Makes sense. Very cool. So normally you think of implementing new technology, some type of implementation training process, ongoing support that you would need to provide from the staffing perspective. I mean these appear from what you’re saying to be pretty self-sufficient and pretty self-explanatory. But is there anything that you know was involved with getting all that set up and any training or ongoing support that you need or simply change the batteries when they run out?

Marti Milligan:
8:22

Yeah, I mean the training really is here’s how you turn it on and here is you know how you change the batteries. But we do person-centered care as many senior living communities do. We also do the Teppa Snow approach. So we utilize a lot of those trainings within using these animals in more comfort. But I wouldn’t call it therapy, I would call it more comfort for residents.

Patrick Leonard:
8:45

Got it. Okay . So from my understanding, you’re also using robotics in other ways at your community. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how else you’re using it throughout The Ridge?

Marti Milligan:
8:55

Sure. So this year we introduced robots in our dining room and restaurants at our Colorado location. So we have two robots in independent living and we have two robots in our assisted living dining room.

Patrick Leonard:
9:10

Very cool. So how has that been, I imagine obviously has probably a little bit more of an impact, a little bit more configuration, some things you have to work out, some training opposed to the pets who again just are kind of there as a companion. So tell me how that’s gone in the dining room from a dining perspective, what has the impact been on the staff and the residents?

Marti Milligan:
9:30

So as with many other senior living providers, we were hitting a lot of staffing shortages last year and we were looking at creative ways in how can we address these staffing shortages, provide that utmost service that our residents deserve, but be able to deliver it in a timely manner. And again, we were at one of the conferences and we saw these robots that were being utilized in dining, in senior living restaurants. So we looked into that, as far as would that be first of all cost savings? Second of all, do they work? We went to another senior living community that was utilizing them so that we kind of see how that process went. We had to do some minor modifications as far as doors going into the kitchen and thresholds, but extremely minor modifications for that. And then we were able to introduce the robots and ultimately we’ve been able to cut two FTEs after the introduction of those robots.

Patrick Leonard:
10:30

Wow! So cost savings and then the residents, it doesn’t seem to bother them or freak them out in any way. <laugh> ?

Marti Milligan:
10:36

No, the residents have embraced them. When we brought all four, so, The Ricge Pinehurst is a large community. It’s rental, independent living, assisted living and memory care and we have this very large lobby area. So, we brought all four robots in and did a demo for the residents . And then we had a naming contest so the residents were able to name them, they kind of got a little close with them. So we settled on the names Ridgely for The Ridge Senior Living, Wally , Luna, and Rosie. Because if you’re going to have a robot, you have to have a Rosie , right?

Patrick Leonard:
11:13

<laugh>, Rosie the robot. I love it! <Laugh> . That’s such a cool way to incorporate the residents and get their buy-in and make them feel part of the process as well. I love it. So what would you say, I mean there’s people out there who are in different levels of adopting technology like this in particular robotic, particularly in senior living communities. So what would you say to those out there? I mean, obviously with senior living being such a people-centric business as you mentioned, what would you say to those that fear that robotics, maybe particularly more so in the dining sense that you just mentioned, but just in general the fear of maybe losing a little bit of that human touch that is so important in senior living and the fear that that might be removed in some form or fashion by the utilization of robotics. Can you talk a little bit about that for some of those people who may be fearing that for someone who’s been through it in a couple ways on the other side of it?

Marti Milligan:
12:04

Actually, very interesting that you say, aren’t these robots going to take the people portion out of it? Because actually the opposite happened . These robots are allowing us to have more face time with residents and to spend more time individually with each of those residents during that dining experience. So the robots have cut down on the steps going to, for example, busting a table, taking the dirty dishes to the dishwasher or the food is ready and it needs to be brought out to the table. In independent living, we have two robots. In assisted living, we have two robots. One is strictly for dirty dishes, the other is strictly for food delivery. And what we found is we can deliver the food faster, we can deliver it hotter and we can have better service when we’re doing that. So our wait staff has handhelds to take the order so they’re not leaving the dining room to take the order and then the robot is bringing the order to the table. So they essentially don’t have to leave the area at all. They can continue to service residents the entire time that they’re on their shift.

Patrick Leonard:
13:15

Wow. And that’s a great perspective on it. And so when the food is coming out, the later will be there to actually take the plate and still serve the residents. They’re just doing the work of getting it out there and similarly, when busting the table, are they taking the plates and simply putting it on the robot, Rosie the robot, we’ll call it <laugh> and Rosie’s taking that back to the dishwasher, is that what you’re saying?

Marti Milligan:
13:36

Yes! So you still have that human touch, that human interaction during the service. Our dining rooms , the way that the main restaurant is set up, we also have a bar that’s adjacent that serves food and drink and it’s a little bit of a walk. So think about many times in one evening a server having to walk from where they’re picking up the food at the kitchen through one restaurant through the bar to deliver. That’s a number of minutes that that simply is taking. Now that server can stay, they’re interacting, they’re taking the next order, maybe they’re busting another table if that’s what’s needed. And if it’s a larger table, these robots can hold up to six plates. So if it’s a larger table, we don’t have to have two servers bringing food out, we can now have, you know, Rosie the Robot bringing the service to the table. And then you know, Ridgley might be cleaning up so somebody is there loading the dishes on but they’re not taking all those steps in between.

Patrick Leonard:
14:33

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. It really helps to walk through because if you haven’t done it in a community that has them before, you can watch videos as much as you want online, but you walk through kind of from the order taking all the way to the bus to the table really well. And I think that paints a really good picture. I mean it makes the waiters’ lives easier and takes probably the least fun part out of that job away <laugh> and makes it more efficient.

Marti Milligan:
14:55

The robots are interactive as well. So the only thing we did have to work with residents on is we had to ask them to please not move the tables, like push tables together because the robots are programmed to go to each individual table and if you move a table somewhere, it’s not gonna know where it is . But if a resident is walking in front of the robot, the robot will stop and it will say, “excuse me,” and then the resident can move out of the way and the robot will not continue to go until that resident is at a safe distance.

Patrick Leonard:
15:25

Wow. Amazing.

Marti Milligan:
15:26

It sings “Happy Birthday”

Patrick Leonard:
15:28

<laugh> . There you go.

Marti Milligan:
15:30

So, residents are bringing their families in now on their birthdays so that the robot can sing their grandkids “Happy Birthday.” How amazing is that?

Patrick Leonard:
15:38

Wow. Amazing. Amazing! You would just never imagine . I love it! You all clearly gotten so creative with the use of it. I’m sure you’re a model for these companies who are providing these robots is probably the best use case out there. So thanks for sharing all that. Is there any key learnings that you wish you knew prior to implementing any robotics, any fashion of the communities or what would you say to other senior living communities out there who haven’t made lead that they should be considering that The Ridge has kind of learned from the process ?

Marti Milligan:
16:06

Well as far as the robotic animals go, I think the robotic animals, it’s just a very minimal investment absolutely worth it to have in your memory care neighborhoods. Now the robots in dining, that is a little bit more of an investment depending on what company you choose to provide that they come, they do the training, they help you with programming it. The biggest thing is really having them come look at your kitchen to see what the thresholds are, how the robots can get in and out. Because as I said with us, we had to do some minor renovations and some adjustments to be able to facilitate the robots. They can’t open doors, they’re not that advanced yet.

Patrick Leonard:
16:43

Yeah, someday , someday soon I’m sure. Awesome. Well, Marti, are there any other final thoughts or words of wisdom you want to provide our listeners before we part ways today?

Marti Milligan:
16:53

I just think that we have to embrace technology in senior living. We saw over the past year that the staffing shortages, I don’t really see an end to that. Also, we will have more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 65 here in the next couple of years. So we have to be creative in how we’re providing services to our seniors and technology robotics is just one element in that delivery of care and services as we have this aging population.

Patrick Leonard:
17:25

I love it. Couldn’t have said it better myself! Well, Marti, thanks again so much for taking the time to be here today on the show and really to educate our listeners and myself on this topic of robotics. I think you demystified and really brought it down to a practical sense and use case in a senior living community from your perspective and how it’s really benefiting and not only benefiting but it sounds like enriching the lives quite significantly of both residents and staff members and family members coming in and and getting “Happy Birthday” sung to them. So, thanks again for your time today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Patrick! Awesome. And listeners, thanks for tuning into another episode of Raising Tech! If you have any feedback or a topic idea or would like to be on the show yourself, please feel free to reach out to us on our website , www.ParasolAlliance.com. Have a good one!

Patrick Leonard: 0:06

Welcome back to Raising Tech, a podcast about all things technology and senior living. I'm your host, Patrick Leonard. Today we're going to talk about something that is all over the news these days and a lot of people are talking about, but we're hoping to put our own perspective on it. We're gonna talk about generative AI and in particular ChatGPT of course, and really want to talk about the implications ChatGPT has on senior living community operators. So with that, I'm excited to introduce our listeners to our guest today, John Middlemore, who's actually our Director of Engineering here at Parasol Alliance. John , welcome to the show.

John Middlemore: 0:43

Thanks for having me, Patrick.

Patrick Leonard: 0:45

Absolutely. Thanks for being here. So to start things off, before we dive into the topic today, John , do you mind just giving our listeners a little bit of background about your yourself and kind of career in it?

John Middlemore: 0:56

Absolutely. I am coming up to 30 years in it. I'm a bit of a dinosaur in the IT world. I actually started out in mainframe computing 30 years ago and punch cards and stuff like that. Over the space of 30 years, I've worked in pretty much in every industry, finance, transportation, healthcare , state and local government. So I've pretty much covered all the bases and all the industries.

Patrick Leonard: 1:19

Awesome. And senior living of course is now your favorite, I'm sure.

John Middlemore: 1:23

It's absolutely

Patrick Leonard: 1:24

Awesome. So to dive into our topic a little bit, for those who aren't familiar again these days, everybody's familiar in some sense, whether it be the best information they're reading about it or hearing about it or not for better or for worse, but for those who aren't as familiar, can you summarize for our listeners what exactly is this concept of generative AI and why is it making such a big buzz right now across the world?

John Middlemore: 1:47

Absolutely. So basically there's a number of AI algorithms out there. Generative AI is based on something that the AI algorithm has been trained on. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI creates new content in the form of images or audio, text, etc. and most of those in the recent ones around this are cause of ChatGPT.

Patrick Leonard: 2:17

Yeah, absolutely. So outside of ChatGPT, AI is being used in many forms already and I didn't even realize it myself until I started to really dig into this. That whole concept of ChatGPT and really understanding a little bit more about the concept of generative AI and AI in general. It's been around in many forms for a while now. I think that people like myself might not have even realized it. So can you describe a little bit about those common use cases and how these are different than the concept around ChatGPT itself?

John Middlemore: 2:51

Yeah, I would imagine the biggest one that everyone actually does know about, even though they probably don't realize it, is self-driving cars. So that's probably the biggest use that's known throughout the world. Most people don't associate it with AI, but it is actually a form of AI, basically AI in cars. It observes speed direction of over cars and it identifies specific actions regarding its surrounding items. So it sees a car obviously breaking in front of it. The AI knows that puts on the brake of your car and stops you. If it is on a highway and it's judging distance and speed, it'll speed up, slow down once it judges how far a car in front is or someone falls in front of you or someone slammed on their brake . So that's probably the most popular form of AI. Again, obviously people may notice AI in security cameras, right? Facial recognition, everyone has an iPhone today. You take out your iPhone, you put it up to your face, it recognizes your face and and that unlocks it. That again, is a form of AI.

Patrick Leonard: 3:54

Yeah, absolutely. And even Alexa, Siri, these are all things leveraging AI on every day . It's been around for while , but it's really just getting a different formats now . So thanks describing for us .

John Middlemore: 4:06

Yeah , absolutely . I just don't think we normally realize in our day to day interaction with them as being AI devices.

Patrick Leonard: 4:14

Sure. So let's bring it back a little bit to the senior living industry use case here. Again, there's a lot of buzz out there, negative, positive, trying to, you know, tow this line between how to best leverage this. So particularly as it relates to senior living communities itself and there's already a lot of compliance regulation around the senior living industry. So can we dive into, first let's talk about the positives. What are some of the positive use cases for senior living community staff members and even residents to leverage the power of something like a ChatGPT or generative AI?

John Middlemore: 4:51

Yeah, I think we touched base on some of these in the previous questions. So smart home devices, monitoring, alerting in the home, digital voice assistance . And like I said earlier, you know, opening your iPhone, those are all positives in the senior living community. Obviously in the nursing sector as well. You know, AI is helping diagnose and prescribe medicines, etc. So you can see a doctor on , on your phone, right, on an app. And part of that initial consultation is AI based , right? You answer questions, it decides where you , what those answers are, where they lead you to and it directs you to a specialist or a general doctor , etc. So that is all based on AI in the background, deciding on your answers, where to direct you.

Patrick Leonard: 5:37

Yeah, for sure. And I know just my world of , from a marketing perspective, I know a lot of people are leveraging it to a certain extent. I know I've used it to even provide outlines for some content that I'm looking to write up, but I know I do have to be careful in what this thing's spitting out and telling me, right? Cause it's not at all useful. It's not replacing the human touch and the power of human writing by any means I have found, but it , it can just be a thought provoker, it can provide an outline. So I know a lot of marketers in the senior living space are talking about those use cases a little bit as well. Now on the flip side of things, <laugh> , if we play a little bit of devil's advocate around generative AI and ChatGPT certainly can be used unfortunately just like a lot of things in a negative way that might impact the senior living community operators and their residents. So can you talk a little bit about that and really what folks should be weary of when leveraging a tool like this at their community?

John Middlemore: 6:34

So because it's a learning system, any piece of data that you input into ChatGPT or other AI programs, it basically stores that information forever and it then uses that information to provide answers for anyone else who asks questions. So in this case, you have to be very careful what data you give it, right? So you, you have to be, make sure you don't give it any personal data, anything like social security numbers, banking, even medical history. So whatever you tell these AI systems, they will store that information forever. ChatGPT most of its answers are actually based on information it already gathered and ended in 2021 . So it's not an online system. So it's not learning, it's not gonna provide an answer for data it found yesterday. So it's storing that data, it will store that data forever. So whatever information you give out, it will be out there in the general public globally, forever. It's not gonna get deleted and it's not going to be secure because the system itself uses that information to give you the answer. So if you, you know, specifically gave it John Middlemore's security number and then someone else in the globe said, "Hey, can you tell me what John Middlemore's social security number is?" ChatGPT would give you the answer.

Patrick Leonard: 7:54

It's a little scary to think about <laugh>. So with that in mind, k ind o f talking about, you know, how w e can use it in a positive way. Some of the things to be weary of in t he negatives, are there steps that senior living community l eaders should be taking to make sure that their staff and their residents are protected from these negatives while at the same time giving them the freedom to kind of leverage the power of this tool?

John Middlemore: 8:20

Absolutely. Communities already have policies in place around usage through email, especially medical records obviously compliant to HIPAA regulations. Entities should have a policy, a written policy in place, on the use of any of these AI tools. And it should have the staff educated in their use so they can use them safely and in a way where they're not giving out sensitive information.

Patrick Leonard: 8:43

That makes sense. And so along that same vein, are you aware of any type of training or other resources available to folks who don't know where to turn? Cause I imagine many senior living community leaders out there, you know, may have a framework like a lot of us are working knowledge of things to be cautious about or things to leverage in a positive way. But as far as actually creating these policies and developing a training program so that people are using it the right way, are you aware of any resources available out there? Is it something you should reach out to your IT department or where would you turn if you were someone who wasn't as savvy in this area as yoursel, for example?

John Middlemore: 9:21

I would actually turn to a company like Parasol Alliance. We're very much head of the game on this. We already have an in-house policy related to ChatGPT and we're very much able to help with training and policy creation for these communities.

Patrick Leonard: 9:37

Director of Engineering here, folks, you heard it first do it a little sales pitch for us here on the episode. It wasn't even me so <laugh> . But yeah , whether it be Parasol Alliance or whoever your current IT resource is, definitely a great place to start. It sounds like if you don't have a policy around it already, definitely put something in place and develop some formal type of education and training for your staff and residents. So that's great. So I guess at this stage in the game, John , are the concerns around the potential risks and the negative outweighing the positives at this point? In your opinion , should communities be considering restricting their staff and residents from having access to this tool altogether at this point? Or do you think that's a little extreme?

John Middlemore: 10:17

Yeah, I think that's a little extreme. I think like any emerging technology, you have to be careful and you have to make sure that you do have a policy around it. You also have to make sure that you do train your staff as well. But I think with all technologies, they all have benefits and they all have downsides. It's having the ability to actually pick out where and when in the cycle of the emergence of the technology that you need to use it and how you need to use it and adhere to a policy as that technology grows, right? So the policy today for these items is going to be a lot different than in 10 years time. When it's more mature, it's more widespread and we're probably using it in everyday life. But any technology, you know, email has been around for close to 30 years in one form or another. We still today have policies around email with every company that we work for day to day . We should have policies even at home when we're using Google or any other kind of email to protect ourselves. But also to , you know , in a work environment to protect the company, to protect the staff and residents or customers. It's important to have that policy.

Patrick Leonard: 11:27

Yeah , that makes a lot of sense. I guess looking towards the future and where this thing could possibly go, I know it's impossible to predict, but if you kind of got your crystal ball out, what do you think's next in this space? I mean, I've heard things as crazy as reproducing music is happening right now. A new Beatles song came out from John Lennon h imself that was reproduced through this tool. So it's just crazy to think about. It seems so advanced already, but there also seems to be so little regulation around it. So from your opinion, what's next? Where are things going in the short and long t erm as far as g eneral AI and ChatGPT?

John Middlemore: 12:04

Yeah, again, I , something you touched on earlier about marketing, right? I think you'll find in the next few years a lot of companies will start making commercials in the normal sense. They're going to use this to make a commercial. Movie companies are going to make , use this to create movies. So we may be seeing less actors in the future and we'll see artificially generated actors, music as well. We're probably going to see this a lot more in our daily lives where , you know, self-driving cars, we're probably gonna get delivery systems for companies like Amazon and that are powered by this and we don't have people in trucks anymore, you know, delivering this to our door. I think as far as the regulation of this goes, I think it started outside of the US already, I was reading an article the other day that in Europe they're already putting rules around this . I think maybe Europe sometimes is ahead of the US in that respect. So I would imagine that first we'll be adhering to any regulations that come out of Europe will probably follow those regulations in some form or over that. Normally what happens a lot in technology anyway because they have strict data regulations in Europe more so than the US. So I think we're definitely gonna see a lot more regulation and we're going to see a lot of things in our day-to-day life. You know, when we go to McDonald's, we order a burger. We may not see people there anymore making that burger. It'll be the robot in communities that we work with. I know we've been to trade shows and that they're already having robots that deliver food and that to residents. So I think very much so more of that in the short term and long term .

Patrick Leonard: 13:41

Now you got me hungry for a Big Mac, John.

John Middlemore: 13:44

Made by a robot.

Patrick Leonard: 13:46

<laugh> <laugh> .

John Middlemore: 13:47

I actually read that there is a McDonald's somewhere in the US, I don't know where it is , but it's fully staffed with AI and robots and there's no people there. So it's amazing how fast this technology is actually getting out in the world in a practical purpose. Far more so than maybe that's happened previously. I'm old enough, I can remember cell phones when they were like bricks and you had to carry them around in on a wheel transport device. Cause the battery is that low. Relatively speaking, it's taken 20, 30 years since the smartphone came on board . The speed of technology advancement and getting into our daily lives has increased. So I don't think it will be 30 years before we see the full impact of AI. It's likely to be in the short term .

Patrick Leonard: 14:28

Crazy to think about.

John Middlemore: 14:29

Absolutely!

Patrick Leonard: 14:31

Well, John , thanks so much for your time today. I think this discussion was great. I personally learned something in it as well and I know our listeners will. Are there any final thoughts or words of wisdom even that you wanted to instill on our listeners before we part ways today ?

John Middlemore: 14:47

I would just say technology as a whole is beneficial to us all. But like anything in life, we need to make sure we have safeguards and security in place around them. And I think that's, again, where companies like ours come in to play, right? If we can go out and do the research and make sure that people don't have to do that and then advise accordingly.

Patrick Leonard: 15:07

Yeah, absolutely. It's a full-time job in itself.

John Middlemore: 15:10

Absolutely.

Patrick Leonard: 15:10

Well John , thanks again for taking the time to educate our listeners today on this topic, and listeners, thanks for tuning in for another great episode of Raising Tech! If you have any feedback at all on this episode or topic idea, or want to be on the episode yourself, please reach out on our website at www.ParasolAlliance.com. Have a great one!

Patrick Leonard:
0:06

Welcome back to Raising Tech, a podcast about all things technology and senior living. I’m your host, Patrick Leonard. So today we’re gonna talk about a very interesting solution for gait training, mobility and falls prevention, which is always a hot topic for senior living communities and I’m excited to welcome and introduce our guests to the listeners today, who’s Craig Hillman from GaitBetter. Craig, welcome to the show.

Craig Hillman:
0:29

Thanks, Patrick, glad to be here.

Patrick Leonard:
0:31

Awesome, we’re happy to have you. So Craig, we’ve met a few weeks ago at one of the LeadingAge conferences out in Maryland and you know, you’re immediately struck by the GaitBetter team as you walk by the booth, as you know they have the treadmill going and kinda the virtual reality experience, which of course we’ll dive in more today. But can you start things off before we get too far into it by giving our listeners a little bit of background about yourself and GaitBetter?

Craig Hillman:
0:54

Sure, happy to. So I actually, I’m relatively new to senior living and I would say kind of health tech in general. My background actually is engineering. I actually was in what’s called the software simulation space for a long time. That way to describe it is reliability of electronics, making sure that that iPhone in your pocket doesn’t fail when you don’t want it to. But I had a great time in that space. Actually founded a company, sold it just before Covid, God bless, and right around the same time met the CEO and founder of GaitBetter, Hilik Harari. And kind of initially he was starting his company. I had just stopped running my own company and kind of offered to be just an informal advisor, help him kind of reach for the stars so to speak. And really over the 18 months I had a chance to talk to Hilik. I was really inspired by him and really inspired by the technology and what it was doing in Israel. All the amazing things, the outcomes, the embrace of the technology. He would share with me really just emotional inspiring letters from spouses of people who had been on GaitBetter spouses who had not left the couch in six months, who were worried who wouldn’t leave the apartment because they were worried about falls, they were worried about walking and really just having a transformational outcome. You know, without pills or without taking a class for like 12 months or longer. After kind of talking to Hilik for 18 months, I kind of looked around and said, you know what? I’m in a time of my life. I really would like to be inspired to help people to do good things. So I literally begged him to let me on to GaitBetter and bring that technology here to the US and that was about two years ago.

Patrick Leonard:
2:34

Wow, that’s awesome! Thanks for providing that background. It’s always fascinating to me to hear how people get into this crazy senior living space and where they’ve come from and what they’ve kind of built and worked on before. So thanks for providing that background. So for those who aren’t as familiar with the concept, can you educate our listeners a little bit more about what is gait training? Why is it so important? Specifically in the use case of senior living communities?

Craig Hillman:
2:59

I’ll take a step back and what’s been really inspiring is so, I have a PhD and I’m not doing that to be a humble brag, but really to kind of give you just a little bit of insight, I was trained for a brief moment to kind of do research and so joining GaitBetter you know, it was inspired by a lot of research coming out of Tel Aviv University and other institutions around the world. So you know, in my free time late at night, I would kind of read some of these publications and really became kind of inspired by what I learned, not just for GaitBetter but really in for my own health and hopefully as I describe it, for the people living in senior living communities and people helping those seniors in living communities. And what I found was the best way to describe it is walking is one of the best cognitive tasks you can do. So it turns out that walking in the real world is very cognitively demanding and the way they explained it when they explained it, it kind of made sense, right? Which is you are multitasking like crazy when you are walking, you know that whole thing Mom says “don’t chew gum and walk at the same time.” That’s because you’re thinking about all these other things while you’re walking. You’re going to distract yourself when you’re chewing gum. But when we just normally walk in the real world, let’s say you’re going, I don’t know, you are gonna take your kid for an ice cream cone. They’ve been really good that day. They ate all their dinner, even if they had Brussels sprouts, you’re going to take them for an ice cream cone on that walk. What are you thinking about? So you’re walking, you’re already doing motor planning, you’re thinking about where you’re putting that feet, you’re thinking about where your son is in 3D space. There’s somebody approaching you, you’re actually doing a mental prediction because you’re seeing where that person’s walking and where they will be in the future. So you don’t run into them. There’s audible distractions around you all the time . You’re thinking about how to get to that ice cream store. So you’re using working memory and what you’re going to buy when you get there. It’s an amazing amount of mental energy and because it’s multitasking, it pushes all that activity to the front of the brain and so what ends up happening is as we age, unfortunately the part of the brain that ages the most is that same part that handles what they call executive function or really that multitasking capability. We lose that ability to multitask as we age. And this is why we struggle with gait, and this is why we fall because when we get into a situation where we cannot handle all these kind of motor and cognitive tasks simultaneously, the brain will, for lack of better description, shut down. It will decide not to do certain things. So you might forget where you’re going, right? The working memory might fall away, you may run into somebody, right, because you weren’t predicting where they would be accurately. But also you can lose that motor planning. So you plant your foot incorrectly and then you will fall. In fact if you ask an older adult. So, two things, are really fascinating: one is the overwhelming majority of falls in otherwise I would say healthy, older adults. A. They fall while they’re moving, they fall walking up the stairs, down the stairs, walking on flat ground , but they’re typically moving or walking. And if you ask them why they fell , they’ll tell you I wasn’t paying attention. But it’s not their fault, it’s what’s happening in the brain. So realizing that walking is really a success of walking is really a cognitive task. That was the inspiration behind GaitBetter. How do I retrain the brain so I can reduce fall, I can become more confident and stay mobile for a longer portion of my older adult life. That was kind of the genesis of GaitBetter.

Patrick Leonard:
6:27

Amazing, thanks! That’s really interesting. And the way you kind of walked us through that journey from start to finish really kind of clicks and I think it makes sense to a lot of people at the same time. I don’t think I ever wanted brussels sprouts and ice cream at the same time as much. So thank you for <laugh> . Thank you for triggering my hunger as well, right <laugh> . So that makes sense from a conceptual standpoint now. So going back a little bit into the the GaitBetter solution, can you tell me a little bit more how you bring those concepts and kind of the science behind everything you just described to life through a tangible product and solution for communities?

Craig Hillman:
7:05

100%! So, imagine you’re this researcher so figured out that, I mean again this , it’s more than just them, right? It is I think a pervasive awareness understanding among people who are experts in this area. So we know walking is a cognitive task. So how do I create something that’s gonna be useful to older adults? So what’s great about this team, they’re gerontologists, they’re neurologists, they’re physical therapists and they all kind of got together in the room and they brainstorm. You know, we used to brainstorm in the same room before Covid for antiquated idea. So they all brainstorm, right? And they also, the neurologist came the table with an awareness of kind of what they call the neuroscience of aging. So if I’m going to retrain the brain, if I need a brain exercise, what are some important key aspects in order to retrain the brain successfully? And so it’s quite fascinating Patrick. So the first is as we get older and it has to do partially with like how are the connectivity between the different parts of the brain, we are less able to skill transfer or to transfer skills from one activity to another. And the best example I’ll give you is, let’s go back to your son who likes to eat brussel sprouts and ice cream. So your son’s gonna be the next Mike Trout , amazing baseball player. So his coach is most likely teaching him certain skills that your son will be able to transfer onto the field, like how to catch or hit or whatever it is . As we get older, we lose that ability. And a good example of that is they did a big study about how, you know, older adults are supposed to do crossword puzzles to stay cognitively sharp. Well they found out if you have an older person, you have them do lots of crossword puzzles, they get really good at crossword puzzles . That’s it. So number one, if I want to retrain the brain, I have to put it through an activity that is similar to what experiences in the real world. That means I need to be walking and I need to have cognitive challenges that are almost exactly the same as the cognitive challenges I experienced in the real world. I have to do motor planning , I have to hear sounds, I have to see things coming towards me, I have to have a destination. So that’s really important. The second is they find out that neuroplasticity, which is, I will admit an overused word unfortunately in a lot of health tech , but in order to really form those new connections I need to have an elevated heart rate. I won’t get into the whole physiology, but when I elevate my heart rate, there’s actually a synergistic almost effect in terms of neuroplasticity. If I am sitting on my rear end, you will not see as much of a neuroplasticity even if you’re doing the exact same thing that if you were walking or even just kind of at elevate heart rate. So there’s a couple other kind of key things, but those are the two important things. So realizing that they came together and decided to utilize kind of we’ll call semi-immersive virtual reality in front of a treadmill. So what does that mean? So GaitBetter works with any existing treadmill. It is not a treadmill, it just works with any existing treadmill and what they do is they have a camera. They put a camera in front of a treadmill and it watches your feet as you walk on that treadmill. And then it presents these disembodied feet that represent the movement, your gait movement onto a TV screen in front of you. So if you lift your left foot, the left foot on the TV screen moves, you move your right foot, the right foot on the TV screen moves. And so these disability feet are in a virtual reality environment. And so they, as they walk through this environment, we give them a number of motor and cognitive challenges that very much are applicable to real world . So you start off with a map, you’re going to that ice cream parlor. So you have to remember how am I going to get there? Is it two lefts and a right? Is it two rights and a left? You have to remember that, and as I’m walking through this environment, it can be a crowded, noisy environment, it can be a gentle quiet environment. We actually adjust it based upon people’s cognitive capabilities. For example, it’s like wait, look you don’t give somebody who’s lifted weights for years a 200 pound bench press. We start them off slowly. We do a very similar thing here. And then again we give them these kind of cognitive challenges. They have to see people coming, they have to overcome herbs and puddles. They have to, they hear noises like planes and birds and cats and dogs and people, all the stuff you would see and we do it in a very methodical and structured way. So it’s almost like strength training. Again, I’ll go back to that analogy. By the time they’ve gone through well 15 sessions, those new neural connections have formed and they’re much more confident walking in these real world environment.

Patrick Leonard:
11:25

That’s amazing. You’re hearing more and seeing more about virtual reality. You know, the more I talk to people about virtual reality, the more you experience and you know, go to conferences and read about it. There’s so many different use cases for it now than we just kind of typically think of, or at least I did had a bias towards what virtual reality meant . And there’s the gaming experience side of it, right? There’s the educational side of it, there’s the experiential side of it and this is a whole new for me concept and use case for it that just seems so advanced in so many different nuances from a technology standpoint. How did we get here? What’s kind of the background of where we came and how we got to this point where we can actually use this in the way that you just described as an end user to experience all those different things .

Craig Hillman:
12:12

GaitBetter concept really has been about 15 years in the making, right? Wow. And so it , that kind of speaks to there’s all these different use cases of VR but if we really think about it, the idea of VR has been around now for probably over 20 years, but it takes a while to kind of launch. And so I want to say really going back as far as like 2008, 2007, the team that eventually would develop the predecessor for GaitBetter was already thinking about this whole neuroplasticity and you know, what is the best tool to drive these new neural connections and deciding that virtual reality was the best approach. They actually tried a fully immersive approach first rather than the TV screen which we call semi immersive. They actually tried using the goggles, but goggles don’t work really well if you’re trying to hit some of those key neuroscience facts about aging. Number one is I need to be walking, I need to be walking because I need to be doing the same thing I do in the real world, right? We struggle with skill transfer and I need an elevated heart rate. I need to be moving somehow. I need to be maybe breathing hard a little bit. So when they tried kind of virtual reality, they’re ran into two big problems. The one is, if you wanna laugh, type in “VR walking” into YouTube and watch the thousands of people running into their children into the wall, into the kitchen counter. So, if you can’t see where you’re going, you’re not going to be very good at walking. But also older adults really struggle with that single focal plane that you’re forced into when you have VR goggles. So VR goggles definitely have, there’s some amazing research out there on what they can do, especially from like a pain management. But most of that is geared towards younger adults. When you move into older adults, after about 10, 15, maybe at most 20 minutes older adults start getting nauseous. They get dizzy because again the eye is not used to just looking at a single focal plane and it’s forced into that situation with the VR goggle. So we looked at the VR goggles but eventually kind of knowing some of the limitations, that’s how we chose the semi immersive instead.

Patrick Leonard:
14:15

Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense because even if you’re on a treadmill and walking and not using this solution just simply looking at a television screen or you know, whatever it might be in front of you, it seems to be a similar experience from its simplest form that someone would be accustomed to or used to. It’s just doing a lot more obviously for the person.

Craig Hillman:
14:34

It’s a great point. Who has not seen a TV in front of a treadmill, right? Right . This is not a scary new thing. You’re gonna be very familiar. Now, most older adults aren’t typically on a treadmill or not really walking at all. This is part of the problem. So we also provide small safety system. It helps in two ways. So one, we find that senior living staff that are worried about putting, it’s, I guess I’m thinking everyone would find understand this is kind of amusing. On the one hand a lot of these new senior living communities have these amazing gyms. We’ve all seen them. They’re gorgeous, they have the latest technology. At the same time senior staff are very nervous about senior living residents as being on that same treadmill. So we have a very simple little safety system in place. So when the person gets on there, I mean we’re going to challenge them, right? We’re asking them to do things beyond what they normally do that’s intentional. Just like you get stronger and weightlifting because you’re lifting weights that are heavier than you would lift in the real world. Same basic idea. We’re going to give you cognitive challenges that are heavier than what you experienced in the real world. And so in case you’re worried about like stumbling or something like that, while you’re on this treadmill, we have a little safety system to keep everybody safe and confident in terms of that training activity.

Patrick Leonard:
15:45

Yeah, that’s fantastic, and obviously a really crucial piece I imagine of the considerations that were taken in implementing this. And so as I think about this, I think about at the community level, how is this being spearheaded? Who’s kind of taking it upon themselves to work? Is it in more like the rehab, physical therapy side of things? Um , or where does this tangibly happen in the senior living community? And then build upon that, not to ask too many questions at once, but as my mind keeps racing, I imagine there’s a whole lot of data and insights that you’re able to collect from what is actually being experienced for each individual person during this process. Can you talk a little bit about those two things and how that all ties together is being used to kind of ensure healthy and safe residents are patients who are utilizing this?

Craig Hillman:
16:31

So it’s a great question. I think we’re still figuring out Patrick, what is really the most effective implementation for our senior living customers. We definitely have those that place it within a rehab gym and it’s being supervised by trained clinicians like physical therapists or physical therapy assistants, and that’s been very effective. There are limitations there. Not every senior living resident is going to physical therapy. If they’re going to physical therapy, typically they need or they’re looking for a doctor’s referral. Some rehab gyms are relatively small in some of the communities some don’t have at a treadmill, and then there’s obviously you get into the whole like cost and reimbursement kind of situation. They can’t use, you know, they can only use GaitBetter for a certain amount of time or a certain number of sessions. There’s some restriction and it tends to be reactionary. Somebody maybe has fallen or maybe has had a stroke, then they’ll get access to the GaitBetter system. You know, in some senior communities it’s more on the fitness side especially what we’ve been hearing is a lot of operators have these gorgeous gyms. They’re great about attracting new residents, but once they’re in, they don’t really get utilized too much except for maybe a couple operators here and there. And so they, you have this under utilize asset, you’ve spent a ton of money on these wonderful pieces of equipment, nobody’s going in to use them, and it goes to speak a little bit, you go back to that whole gamification, it is the other real strength about GaitBetter. I mean you have the clinical aspect which is really just really powerful in terms of the numbers that come out. But there’s also the gamification side of things. It’s fun. You can watch yourself improve your score. It’s a game very much geared towards older adults. There’s no explosions or space aliens or gore. It’s really right at their speed. And we’ve seen, especially for certain residents who are not joiners, they don’t wanna really do anything get attracted and they come back. They really utilize this facility. So it’s a long way of saying, I don’t really know. Sometimes it’s the rehab gym, sometimes it’s the fitness gym. They can go in either location. We make a small change to the operator screen so it’s a little more push button for the fitness gym because nobody’s really there just the resident or the gym supervisor. We’re in the rehab environment. We make it a little more, they have a lot more levers they can pull because they’re clinical experts. And then you’re right. What’s really also nice about this intervention, let’s say compared to classes is, we really can track each person’s progress. So it’s great. We have table, we have graphs that really show, I did this actually my, one of my motivations for joining GaitBetter was my father-in-law, a Vietnam veteran had a massive stroke four years ago and then in , unfortunately it’s now also on medication that increases his risk for falls . So we decided to put him on GaitBetter and you know, after 3, 4, 5 sessions really got into the score how far he had walked, whether he was walking farther than the time before, whether he was walking faster and he really could see it. It was all being displayed in front of him and it was all something that me and him would review once his session was done, how much better he had done compared to the previous time period. So, it’s right, the gamification really provides a wonderful motivational aspect to it.

Patrick Leonard:
19:28

Yeah, I love that and I’m glad you touched on there is a gamification side of it in addition to the clinical side as well. Being able to tie in something that’s both mutually beneficial as from a clinical perspective as well as something that even socially and just fun and engaging in that sense. You can do both those things at the same time, especially in the senior living setting. I mean that’s the ultimate goal. So that’s fantastic. Thanks for touching on that. So from a curiosity standpoint, are there a lot of other solutions like this in this space? I mean I know we talk about all these different things maybe and I can think of some solutions that are trying to combat some of the false prevention, of course, is a hot topic. There’s different solutions but as far as tying it all together in this sense, is there anything else out there that you all are aware of or coming against in this space?

Craig Hillman:
20:14

Oh, 100%. What’s interesting, of course, is what does fall prevention mean? How do you initiate fall prevention? So it’s really quite fascinating. I would say most of the efforts in the technology space around fall prevention is around what I’ll more describe as fall detection or fall prediction. So, for example, there’s a wonderful company that has a scale that you stand on the scale and based upon I think how you balance, they’ll predict whether or not you’re at risk for falls. There’s a couple of camera systems they’ll put in somebody’s room and kind of observe how they move or whether they’re moving in a certain way. In fact, I was just on a call with somebody, there’s even like a mattress or almost like a pad you can put on a bed and depending on how somebody is rolling, you can predict where they’re fall. We don’t see a lot on the fall treatment side in technology really kind of obviously the detection or prediction, but not so much on the treatment side. And those that are on the treatment side, they have some value. But it , from what I’ve seen in literature, right, they provide a similar value to existing interventions. So how do senior living communities deal with falls? They really deal with them in one of three ways. They offer classes that’s typically for the more from like independent living typically maybe a little assisted living. So you’re talking about like Tai chi or Steady or these group classes where they work on balance for example, a lot, there’s what’s called multifactorial interventions. So they’ll look at the resident and look at their medication, whether they need glasses, so their eyesight, their hearing, making sure there’s no rugs, making sure the room is well lighted, those kind of things. And then there’s physical therapy. But we find, and again it goes back to that whole neuroscience of aging. What you find is because all those interventions typically A. are not really hitting the cognitive, not really acknowledging that cognitive is really a key, if not the key aspect of successful walking and the skills or the activity they’re introducing does not really correlate with real world . Again, a great example is Tai chi . Tai chi , wonderful exercise, but again you’re kind of standing still, you’re not really walking these what are called meta-analysis or these studies of studies, there’s one that comes out every three years, has hundreds and hundreds of studies on fall prevention. They find it actually doesn’t really matter what it is, physical therapy , multi-fold, factorial, these different types of fall prevention classes, they all have a fall reduction rate of about 25% across the board. Whereas GaitBetter approaches close to 70%. I mean this is why I’m so inspired to where for GaitBetter, why I’m so inspired to reach out to these senior livings because I really do think it’s going to be a game changer. And the game changer is that it’s really based upon the fundamental whys of why do we fall.

Patrick Leonard:
22:48

I love that and you , you simplified it for me in my mind because again I think you put it great when you said there’s fall prevention, there’s fault detection. This is really fault treatment because you’re doing something physically and cognitively to help prevent this in the long run that isn’t just simply, okay, walk more or work out more or do this specific activity. This is combining everything in one to really address the root issue. So I really appreciate that perspective. I think that’s a great thing to kind of end on. But before we wrap up, I do want to give you an opportunity, I think this was such a really educational session for me. I think our listeners are really gonna enjoy it as well. I think you speak very well to this solution and the impact it has on your living communities. But before we wrap up today, is there any other final thoughts that you want to make sure that you share with our listeners or any other types of words of wisdom that you might have before we part ways today?

Craig Hillman:
23:44

Maybe one, and I hope no one takes offense, I’ll apologize ahead of time .

Patrick Leonard:
23:47

Uh ohj , here we go!

Craig Hillman:
23:49

So, GaitBetter has been very successful in Israel, but something like 90 plus percent of the Israeli population have access to GaitBetter. It’s really become the standard of care. If somebody’s at considered a risk of falls or they themselves can kind of self-refer, they can go almost anywhere in Israeli society to experience GaitBetter. It can be in a hospital, in an outpatient clinic at a senior center in a senior living community gym all over the place, and we do, to be very transparent, we hear some concerns from the senior community here in the US. They find it potentially maybe too risky or a little scary to put one of the residents on a treadmill to force that resident to do some challenging physical and cognitive tasks. It could be just we’re litigation kind of nervous here in the US possibly, and so I tell them it’s that, listen, the risk is far lower than you might expect and the benefit is so much better. One thing my Israeli colleagues like to talk to me about in the US is we need to be a little more willing to make that jump, make that leap and we’ll see really significant benefit. So that’s what I would tell you. I’m getting old or I’m hope , I think I’m still young, but you know, I feel those aches in the morning and then I’m sure they’ll just get worse as I get older. So right, they’re handling people, they’re handling our parents and our grandparents and they , those who want to know that those parents and grandparents are being kept safe, and I think the mentality because is, well, keep them safe, I don’t want them to do anything that looks scary. I’m going to kind of almost put them in a cocoon. But you also have to realize there’s this use it or lose it aspect to our bodies and our mind. We have to challenge ourselves on a daily basis when we really kind of end going in the wrong direction, and so I think GaitBetter is a very effective way of challenging. It doesn’t take too long 15 sessions and they’re done. So I’m not asking, we’re not going do it every day , but when you see that leap and you see those results, I think it’ll be just an overall benefit to the community and and to the staff as well.

Patrick Leonard:
25:38

Awesome. Well that’s what it’s all about. Well Craig, thanks so much for the conversation today. I personally learned a lot. I think our listeners will too. So thanks for taking the time out of your day to tell us a little bit more about your story and about GaitBetter.

Craig Hillman:
25:50

My pleasure. Hey, thanks for having me!

Patrick Leonard:
25:51

Absolutely. And listeners, thanks for tuning into another episode of Raising Tech. Hope you picked up some valuable information you can take back to your organization today, and if there are any topics you want to hear about in particular or want to be on an episode yourself , please feel free to reach out on our website at www.ParasolAlliance.com. Have a good one!

Patrick Leonard:
0:05

Welcome back to Raising Tech , a podcast about all things technology and senior living. I’m your host, Patrick Leonard, and today we’re gonna talk about a solution that we’ve mentioned and talked about before on the show, but it’s been quite a while. It’s becoming more and more commonplace in senior living over the last couple years. And that topic is virtual reality. So virtual reality, as I mentioned, has become more and more utilized these days and there are also a lot more and more use cases for this technology as well than what people might traditionally think of. So with that, I’m excited to introduce our listeners today to Dr . Ellie Giles , Founder and CEO of Virtual Apprentice. Dr. Giles, welcome to the show.

Dr. Ellie Giles:
0:47

Well thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk about virtual reality and senior wellness.

Patrick Leonard:
0:51

Awesome, thanks. We’re happy you’re here. So to kind of kick things off, Ellie , do you mind telling our listeners a little bit about your background and yourself and why you founded Virtual Apprentice?

Dr. Ellie Giles:
1:05

Sure, I’m happy to do that. So, I started off for 30, over 30 years as an educator teaching special education and working as a school administrator. I moved on as I became an empty nester onto new horizons, not because I didn’t love teaching, but because I think it’s always important to challenge yourself. So I moved on to economic development within our county and help build up a new entity within our county for economic development. And through that became totally excited about workforce development. The county named me as one of the first CEOs of that program. It’s the largest workforce development entity in our state. So I got to really understand career pathways, good ways of getting individuals into jobs and sustaining jobs and what were the barriers for jobs. And I became a little frustrated because I wanted to get people into jobs quickly and found that using technology was the way to go, and particularly virtual reality because virtual reality really can create that workplace environment without having risks and can become competency based . I put out a proposal to my board and to the county council. They were not as willing to adopt virtual reality as quickly as I was, but I could not let the concept go. And so I started my own business and I have had some real success within the training, bringing all of my background together to do that. During the pandemic, nobody wanted to put goggles on their face, as you can just understand. And so it gave me an opportunity to take a look at virtual reality and what capabilities are for other areas, especially looking at social good. And one of the things that we looked at was senior isolation. We were all feeling isolated. And my mom motivated me a little as she was very isolated, being in Florida and I’m being in Maryland. And so I started to look at how I could use virtual reality to support seniors.

Patrick Leonard:
3:03

I love it. Thanks for that background and it is such an interesting background because I think a lot of people, when they think of virtual reality in a sense, think of, I don’t know, maybe the gaming world or the experiential world, which is obviously a piece of what you’re talking about here, but approaching it from an educational background I think is really, really interesting, particularly with its use case, you know, with staff and in the education sector itself, but also in senior living, the potential to to train staff on certain items. So can you dive into those different solutions and a little bit more as far as what you’re seeing are the biggest impact in the solutions that you offer, and particularly how some of those relate most readily to senior living communities?

Dr. Ellie Giles:
3:50

Absolutely. So I’m really glad you asked that question because it gives me opportunity to do some myth busting. Virtual reality was developed for gaming and for entertainment and it’s truly marketed that way. And so it is not really getting the experiences that it can get and the capabilities it can. Virtual reality is just what it says, it is a simulation of reality, but it is totally immersive. It creates such a sense of presence that it improves retention by 90%. People go back and do the training again, we have huge competency development. It mitigates risk. If you’re doing any kind of development training that has any kind of risks to it like a construction site or working in electricity, you’re, you can learn without having that risk involved. And the other nice thing is it is saves a lot of money with consumables because you’re not now utilizing all kinds of consumable equipment while you’re learning, it’s all virtual 3D assets, but you can manipulate it, you can practice with it over and over again and you can create all kinds of learning opportunities. Adults love to learn by doing. Adults love to learn within the context of their learning. Virtual reality provides all of that. So it’s not just for gaming, it’s not just for kids. In fact, I always tell everybody virtual reality, get out of the game and that instead <laugh> so that instead of gaming it, let’s play. Let’s get in there and really use the attributes that it has.

Patrick Leonard:
5:18

That’s great. Yeah, thank you for that. And I got to experience it firsthand at conference LeadingAge Maryland a couple weeks ago, able to try them on and I was in a shark tank, with some sharks <laugh>, and it was quite a crazy experience, but there was multiple different modules I could select. And I imagine that’s just again, a small piece of what you all offer. Can you tell me a little bit more about the experiences that you are offering, sort of templated kind of out-of-the-box solutions that you provide and programming for your clients and how do you balance that with any potential? I don’t know if there’s custom programs that you all offer as well. Tell me a little bit about like kind of the experience development and how clients engage with that.

Dr. Ellie Giles:
5:59

Great. So what we did after I had met with my mom and my, I grew up on the bay boating, when I talked with my mom, we used to share memories of that. So creating that was one of my first experiences was being back down on the water with the boats hearing and letting her be able to sit in her home. She’s not very mobile anymore, but be on the water again, which gave her such pleasure. So that really was how it started. Then I hooked that idea and was accepted into a tech collaborative through Johns Hopkins and NIA to continue to build out that platform. And one of the , the whole mission was to mitigate loneliness, create environments, create experiences where seniors could then have spontaneous conversations about their shared experiences. So that is really my goal. We keep the experiences fairly short because the outcome is conversation and interaction not being in the goggles. So knowing that is what we’re moving for , we’ve created experiences that are senior friendly. So you know, first I should say there’s two components when you develop VR. One is the user’s experience and the other is the content that we actually do. So we really wanted to focus in on both senior friendly user experience and a senior friendly content. So everything we build, we build on our own, we do all our own filming. And so to answer your question, we do have some that are already there that we can keep adding to, but we’re also free using our own 360 photographer and our own editor to create whatever customized programs are needed. I wanna just go into a little detail about what I mean when I say senior friendly, if that’s alright. So first thing we did, and again, I’m , this is all being guided by the, the geriatric program in Johns Hopkins. So we really work very closely with the experts in the field to understand where some of the challenges would be using VR with seniors. So technology as a whole tends to be a challenge for seniors. If you’ve got a lot of controllers or novel experiences, it takes the fun out of it. Like anything, when you have a long learning curve, it takes the fun out of it. So we wanted to avoid that. Everything we have in the goggles is eye-gaze activated , so there’s no need for controllers. You literally put it on, there’s a screen to select kinds of experiences you wanna do and then you can just look at it and activate it. We avoid the need for internet because we download it directly into the headset. So it has its own little processor and we slow down the refresh rate because the goggles are developed for gaming. So it refreshes very quickly. We slowed it down so it doesn’t refresh quickly and it eliminates any kind of dizziness or balance because there’s not as much going on. We then started to look at what was content that was out there and you can have, you know, YouTube videos or some 360 videos that are already out in the universe, but they are way too fast. They tend to be shot like from a drone. So you’re looking down, going down a waterfall, going around a corner. And so they weren’t real senior friendly and that was the reason why we decided to move to develop our own content. Our original content was digital and we now are doing all real filming. We’ve, we’ve gone down toward D. C. And Baltimore, we have tour guides and there’s more interaction, human interaction, which is something that we’ve found that the seniors are appreciating more and having to see people while they’re there, not just things, all of our experiences, the longest experience is five minutes because we don’t want, again, you to be looking at it like TV, you wanna be in there, you wanna look around, enjoy the experience, take off the goggles and talk about it, interact with others. So we’ve really tried to keep our experiences engaging but fairly short.

Patrick Leonard:
9:39

That’s awesome! So that’s the first time I’ve really heard virtual reality described in that way and I think it’s really impactful. I can see a lot of potential pushback for people who aren’t as familiar, thinking, well I don’t want my loved one just sitting with a VR headset all day and just being consumed like a another device, you know, or tablet or tv. So it’s really cool to hear that they are purposefully and thoughtfully built into these bite size type of experiences so you can take it off and have that conversation. So it’s really interesting to me. Can you tell me what have you seen as far as in the communities, how people are putting that to practice? Are they working with life enrichment or activities coordinators? These are kind of group activities and experiences where they go through something together and chat about it or does it just depend on the situation, maybe individual family members in the rooms with the resident or they’ll take turns and then talking about it? Or what have you kind of seen from your end of how this is actually practically used in that way?

Dr. Ellie Giles:
10:38

So all of the above. We mostly are serving senior centers or whether it’s residential or day programs. And one of the things that we provide with every experience are facilitation guides. My background in counseling, I can bring out some facilitation guides. So even if they had the experience, just things that start facilitating conversation if needed. I have to tell you, 90% of the time we just get unbelievably incredible spontaneous language. It’s new, it’s fun, it brings back memories. And so we tend not to need the facilitation guide, but we do provide that for individuals. I also wanted to let you know that one of the things we’re doing within our study is we’re really taking a look at level of engagement and spontaneous language. So as right now we’re really collecting a lot of research in the goggles. We are able to track eye gaze and we are with a heat map technology, being able to watch where the eyes are. Are you really enjoying the 360 of this environment? Are you looking straight ahead like watching tv? And then we’re comparing those that are higher engagement and the spontaneous language to really verify does virtual reality really increase social engagement and mitigate loneliness? And what is the variables that are gonna have individuals really take place and engage in the 360 environment. And that’s really some of the data we’re collecting right now.

Patrick Leonard:
12:02

Thanks for that. And so another thing I love , um, you use the term MythBusters, you’re busting some myths related to virtual reality now, which is super helpful in educational for us. And part of the purpose of having these types of discussions with our listeners is to kind of understand those kind of burning questions for people who aren’t as familiar with, in this case, virtual reality and can kind of answer some of the questions for. So another item that I thought about was, again, people are starting to be very, you know, there’s more and more studies coming out. People are always very hypersensitive of screen time. They’re hypersensitive about how much time they’re spending on their phones, looking at the computer screen during the day, looking at the TV set during night. So this just reminds me know , again, it’s broadest term of another screen. So for those out here thinking well what is the impact on my eyes or just adding to another screen time, can you talk a little bit about the applications or protective measures taken into the development of the technology in the VR headset to kind of mitigate any of those potential risks or problems?

Dr. Ellie Giles:
13:00

So going into VR, the context of it being screen time , I’m gonna do a little pushback on , because I think it’s not really screen time. You are having an experience, you’re going someplace with that. Your mobility or social setting or whatever barriers are there prevent you from doing so. If you wanna go to Hawaii, you just can’t go, you get to go to Hawaii when you wear those goggles or if you wanna look at art or you wanna listen to classical music that brings back memories or even see pictures of family, all of those things can happen within VR. So we’re not really looking at it as a screen time issue because you’re going places virtually, but you’re experiencing it, you’re getting a visceral response from it. It’s visual, it’s motion, you have a gyroscope in there so when you turn your head the environment moves with you. There’s really a very strong sense of presence while you’re there.

Patrick Leonard:
13:55

I love that. Yeah, I , I experienced it myself. I put on , I was amazed at how just any head movement in any direction, it was just a continuation of a 360 view. There was no lag time, there was no confusion. You really felt fully immersed in the experience itself. So I love that, again, busting another myth as it relates around screen time, because it really wasn’t. So I want just raise that up as kind of a question cause I’m sure again people who aren’t as familiar might might be thinking that. So thanks for kind of clarifying and talking through that a little bit more.

Dr. Ellie Giles:
14:25

And screen time is passive, this is active.

Patrick Leonard:
14:27

You know, I think how far VR has come just in the last couple years alone and everything that has happened in this space and I’m constantly learning new things about it and you’ve educated so much today. But from your perspective, you know, where is VR and I guess it’s kind of lifecycle of its potential. We’ve come so far so quickly it feels like, to me at least, I’m sure you have different perspective, but is there still a lot left there as far as innovation goes? Are there things that we should be expecting to see just from virtual reality in general or your solution alone over the next year, two years, five years, whatever it may be down the road? What’s kind of on the horizon as it relates to VR and your solution in particular?

Dr. Ellie Giles:
15:08

So I started my business March of 2020 just because Covid was getting off the ground and the growth in this industry in just those two, three years has been, I mean, overwhelming. I need to always stay within the networks and the institutions and the research because it changes so quickly. Just like when the computers first enter the world, first emphasis has right now been on the hardware, finding hardware that’s robust enough, that’s cost effective , that’s untethered because you’ve got lots of hardware now that’s hooks up to computers. That’s not gonna be an effective tool, especially for seniors. We’ve gotta find the headsets that work independent and get to that right price point. So Google, HP and a company out of China called Pinko , that company who owns TikTok as makes these headsets, there’s Apple who’s come out with it there . You know, all of the industries are really fighting right now to come up with the biggest that is hardware, not so much in content. So the content piece is just emerging now, but I really do see the combination of using VR where you’re in the experience and then AR, where it’s augmented community where you can bring up maps or what you might be looking at as a guide as part of the future of this, where you will be in your virtual environment but be able to be looking at an actual blueprint or an actual schematic or another scene. If you are looking for seniors and they want to navigate a hospital, you might be able to see the floor plan of the hospital while you’re really walking it. So those kinds of things that better bring reality and virtual reality together I see is really where the future’s gonna be. I just recently was contacted by a new senior center and that’s exactly what we’re doing for them is we are creating the senior centers under construction. They are looking to rent their housing, but the seniors can’t visualize it by looking at a floor plan . So we’ve created now 3D floor plans where they can walk in and then visualize their for own furniture in there and see what kind of countertops may I weigh . We can switch it real quickly and they can really get a sense of the living space before purchasing it.

Patrick Leonard:
17:08

Wow, that’s amazing. It’s hard to imagine, you know, it’s something you see out of the movies almost these days, but it’s here, it’s happening and it’s really cool to look forward to those type of things, knowing that it’s available through solutions like you and companies like you who are just on the cutting edge of this type of technology to really bring some of this excitement and innovation to the industry. It’s really, really awesome to hear. I really appreciate you sharing all that with us. Before we wrap up, are there any final thoughts or anything that you’re dying to let the listeners know as it relates to virtual reality or in particular Virtual Apprentice before we sign off today?

Dr. Ellie Giles:
17:46

I think that the most important point that I really, really wanna get across as we talk about my solution or anyone else’s solution is how important it is to address loneliness in seniors. I mean, just recently the Surgeon General talked about that being such a major health risk and the more we’ve moved with social media and people are not having as much face-to-face time as they used to. The health concerns of loneliness is just so severe that anything we can do to mitigate that and that it just elongates life, it voids depression, it helps with all kinds of other health issues, both physical and emotional. And so what motivates me with this tool is not the technology but the outcome, the social good that it will provide.

Patrick Leonard:
18:30

That’s awesome! That’s a great way to sum it up . Dr . Giles, thank you again so much for the conversation today! I personally learned a bunch , I know our listeners will as well. So thanks for taking some time to have the conversation and to educate everyone that’ll be listening to this episode.

Dr. Ellie Giles:
18:44

Thank you, I appreciate it. And feel free to visit our website, www.VirtualApprentice.net.

Patrick Leonard:
18:49

Absolutely! Listeners, thanks so much for tuning in for another great episode of Raising Tech. I know you probably picked up some awesome and valuable information today, like I did. If there’s any other topics you want to hear about or you have a comment on the episode or want to be on an episode yourself, please feel free to reach out on our website at www.ParasolAlliance.com, and have a good one!

Amber Bardon (00:05):
Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I’m your host Amber Bardon, and today our guest is Teryn Waldenberg from Immanuel Lutheran Communities in Kalispell, Montana. Welcome to the show, Teryn.

Teryn Waldenberg (00:15):
Hi, thank you.

Amber Bardon (00:17):
Great to see you today! I’m so excited for you to join the podcast episode and talk a little bit about your technology journey. To start us off, can you tell our audience who you are, what you do, what’s your role?

Teryn Waldenberg (00:29):
Sure. So I’m Teryn Waldenberg, I am the CFO at Immanuel Lutheran Communities. We are a life plan community, single site non-profit in Montana. We have 123 skilled beds, that includes rehab, long-term and memory care. And then we’ve got 106 independent living and assisted living apartments, 40 entry fee apartments and then 24 more memory care beds. So we’re a good size, I would say

Amber Bardon (00:58):
Teryn, One of the facts that I love to tell our clients about ILC is that there’s only two CCRCs in the whole state of Montana, so you are in a pretty unique position. I know that ILC has some plans to grow, but as far as what you can offer the community in the area that that you’re in, I think it’s really unique and it’s really been a pleasure getting to know you and getting to know your community. And of course I love coming on site to Montana, my favorite place to visit out of all of our client sites.

Teryn Waldenberg (01:21):
Yeah, it’s pretty great here. We like people to come visit us too. And it’s also pretty nice that there’s only two of us in the state of Montana and the other one is approximately eight hours away.

Amber Bardon (01:33):
Yeah, so you’re definitely in a unique position. Teryn, you like many of our clients are the CFO and you are overseeing technology which is very common for technology to fall under the CFO role. So to start off with, can you give us some insights on how do you balance your role with technology and being the CFO? How does that play out for you?

Teryn Waldenberg (01:52):
Well, I was pretty lucky in that when I started it did not report to me and so I was really able to kind of stabilize my finance team and my staff. And we are at a point where I’ve got an amazing team that can pretty much run with the day-to-day operations of you know, payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable accounting. And that allows me to kind of step away and focus my attention elsewhere. Also, our new early learning center reports to me, same thing, we hired an amazing team lead there, our director, she’s able to really run with it. And so while yes it does to take some of my time away, I have the ability to be able to kind of not be so immersed in all of that. And then the same thing now with having Parasol as a partner of ours in it. I don’t have to be in the weeds nearly as much as I probably would have. So I feel like I’ve got a really, really, really great team of people who help so that we can all function at our highest level.

Amber Bardon (02:52):
Thank you for that insight. Teryn, can you share what are some of the biggest challenges from a technology standpoint that are facing ILC both in terms of let’s talk about the employee side first and then let’s talk about residents next?

Teryn Waldenberg (03:06):
Sure. So I would say that we would hear issues with just basic functionalities. People not able to fax or print or just standard parts of their job. You know, the phones weren’t working or whatever it might be. We had a strategic assessment done by Parasol and that is largely what the employees were saying was we just need our basic functionalities during the day to work for us. And you know, that’s an ongoing challenge, but something that we’re really focused on kind of cleaning up our infrastructure so that we can address those the right way instead of just band-aiding issues as they come up.

Amber Bardon (03:40):
And what specifically have you seen? Is there any examples you can give us of specific challenges?

Teryn Waldenberg (03:46):
Specific challenges would be phones, you know, voicemail not working or faxing, printing, doors not working properly. There’s any number of issues that are just kind of impede the employee’s abilities to just do their job in an efficient manner, and  sometimes it’s MatrixCare not working properly or they can’t use the link that’s on their desktop or any number of just standard issues.

Amber Bardon (04:10):
Yeah, and you’re not the only community that we’ve been working with that we’ve come in and there’s just a lot of struggles and challenges with, you know, as you said, this basic day-to-day technology use. And it’s really frustrating for staff when their logins don’t work, when their internet doesn’t work, when their passwords don’t work, printing doesn’t work and you know, it’s a lot of time spent to correct those issues and it can be a little bit of a challenge because those are not immediate wins, they’re not quick fixes and a lot of times those things have to be done and that infrastructure and and base level has to be built out before we can get to some of the more exciting projects such as switching out your business systems or doing cool things like robotics and AI and things like that. But it is a process to work through that and I think little by little you can start to gain some of that trust and partnership with technology as those things start to get resolved over time.

Teryn Waldenberg (04:58):
Yeah, It’s nice to know that we’ve got a partner alongside us who’s gonna help us to get where we need to be and is already doing so.

Amber Bardon (05:04):
And on the resident side, what are you seeing as challenges that they’re experiencing?

Teryn Waldenberg (05:09):
Wi-Fi access, the ability to stream all the things that they want in their apartments. It’s pretty much what we see. We also have fall prevention technology that we want to use, but we don’t have the bandwidth to do it. So that’s definitely the biggie.

Amber Bardon (05:21):
Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up Wi-Fi. I actually am hoping to do some presentations at some state conferences on this topic because I personally feel there’s a Wi-Fi crisis coming that every community is dealing with this problem of how do we put in comprehensive wall-to-wall Wi-Fi to support all this great new exciting technology that’s coming out. But it’s very expensive and I think the industry as a whole is going to have to figure out how to solve this challenge, and ILC is definitely no exception and we’re working on a Wi-Fi design right now, but the costs of that are gonna be pretty high as you and I have discussed.

Teryn Waldenberg (05:51):
Absolutely, yeah, we’re seeing a lot of these major infrastructure cleanup projects that we, we have are costly, so we’re having to kind of prioritize and spread them out

Amber Bardon (06:00):
When there’s so many different competing priorities for technology, so specifically I know at ILC there’s been a lot of the infrastructure pieces that we’ve talked about. We also wanna replace most of the business systems that you have and a lot of times people really wanna jump to the things that they will see that immediate impact and not take the time to fix some of those backend things. From your perspective, how do you best approach prioritization and building a plan on how to execute all this different technology?

Teryn Waldenberg (06:28):
Absolutely. We don’t know what we don’t know until we didn’t know what we didn’t know and we realized that, so that’s why we had Parasol come in and do the strategic assessment for us to kind of say, “Hey, here’s what you need to look at.” We’ve got all the bells and whistles and we were on all the demos of the things that we can easily implement that people will see, but we knew we needed to focus on the backend. And really we’ve counted on Parasol to kind of guide us through that, and I think that as a team or as an organization, we are all on board with, “hey, we want our basic systems to work” and in order to do that we need to back up and clean some of these background projects up,” I guess.

Amber Bardon (07:06):
What is your advice on explaining how the prioritization works to the rest of the stakeholders if they feel impatient with the pace on which things are moving forward?

Teryn Waldenberg (07:16):
Really just got a lot of catch up and clean up to do. We’re fixing a lot of the issues that we were previously banding we’re getting down to the root cause and fixing that. And that’s really been all that we need to say. I think that there were enough frustrations and headaches that people understand that that is a priority and needs to be.

Amber Bardon (07:33):
Yeah, that makes sense and it is really great once we can start getting some of those wins in and start to see the immediate impact on people’s day-to-day. Yeah. Speaking of that, are there any success stories that you’ve had that you can share when it comes to technology?

Teryn Waldenberg (07:46):
Sure. So as I said, you know, some of this basic infrastructure, it’s not the bells and whistles and the the fun stuff that the employees see or feel or they know that they see or feel. But a few of them that come to mind are first and foremost my favorite is the budget. I could not wrap my brain around what was being presented to me as a budget and what I needed to budget. And if we were double-paying things, I just, it was messy. So getting the budget under control and understanding what’s in it and why and cleaning all that up has been a huge win, both just for my stress level but also for our financials. And that’s been very helpful. We also completed the server refresh, which was needed. Again, not something that anyone really noticed or could see, but a central part of all of our technology working. And then we also finished the policies and procedures and forms and are almost done with our security project, which are also very important, again, non-sexy items but crucial to our IT environment functioning properly.

Amber Bardon (08:46):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s worth noting that when we started working with you, all of your IT equipment was all beyond end of life. So it definitely probably helps you sleep a little bit better at night knowing that some of that’s been updated and refreshed and there’s less chances and less risk of things going down.

Teryn Waldenberg (09:01):
Absolutely. I sleep much better at night just knowing that Parasol is here.

Amber Bardon (09:05):
What can you tell me is next? What are some exciting projects that are on the horizon for ILC with technology?

Teryn Waldenberg (09:11):
Well, like I said, I don’t know if it’s exciting to many people, but for me it is, and I’m sure for you Amber and your team it’s just kind of getting that basic infrastructure cleaned up and up to date and Wi-Fi in place so that our residents can, you know, stream whatever videos they want to and really just getting us into a good spot. Like I said, we watch demos and we see all of the fun bells and whistles. If we don’t have the technology in place for them, we can’t implement them properly. So getting us there is really our next big step.

Amber Bardon (09:45):
Can I also mention the EMR transition that you’re undergoing? Because that’s pretty exciting.

Teryn Waldenberg (09:49):
We are transitioning our clinical business from MatrixCare to PointClickCare, which our clinical team is ecstatic about and I think the Parasol team is pretty happy about that as well.

Amber Bardon (10:01):
Yeah, definitely. That’s always a fun project to do and it’s so much work, but I’ve never had any client who regrets it. The only thing they say is we wish we would’ve done it sooner. So it’s really exciting to be able to have a system in place coming soon that’s gonna have so much more advanced technology and clinical decision making and the ability to support data-driven decisions. So definitely looking forward to that.

Teryn Waldenberg (10:21):
Absolutely, and I will say that I have been through a major conversion and I was terrified about the thought of transitioning and still am a little bit, but I sleep much better at night knowing that you have done so many of these and that we have you guys kind of guiding us through the process so that we’re not gonna drop any major balls and I think it’s gonna be a smooth transition.

Amber Bardon (10:43):
Teryn, I know we’ve talked a lot about, you know, the basic infrastructure and some of the projects we’re going through with business systems. Is there anything that you can share that is sort of like a, an innovation, a future vision, anything that’s maybe come from Jason, your CEO that you think is maybe down the road with ILC?

Teryn Waldenberg (10:59):
Our leadership team is always looking at new technologies and trying to see how we can improve. And especially with shortages of human bodies to work in the industry. We’re looking at robots for example, trying to figure out how we can reduce our dependency on staffing and so fall prevention technologies, AI, smart home technologies, all kinds of fun things. So I think we probably sit in on one to two demos a week, I think, <laugh> technology demos.

Amber Bardon (11:30):
Teryn, is there anything that you would like to share with our listeners that would be like lessons learned or what you wish you would’ve known? You know, in hindsight with around technology in general,

Teryn Waldenberg (11:40):
Like I said, we did not know what we didn’t know and hiring somebody who really felt focused on the partnership of we wanna walk alongside you in your IT journey and we are going to help you get to where you need to be, we want to see your end goal and we’ll tell you how to get there has been a huge game changer for us, not somebody who is just kind of our help desk and walking us through fixing some of these issues or band-aiding them. IT is a huge deal and we needed to be focusing on it as such. And so I would say if you don’t have a really solid team, team effort for sure, and a good focus on your IT and your infrastructure, it’s something that you should start paying attention to.

Amber Bardon (12:27):
Thank you for those words of advice, Teryn. If our listeners wanna know more about ILC, where can they find more about your community?

Teryn Waldenberg (12:34):
Our website is www.ilcorp.org. We are on Instagram, we’re on Facebook and we recently hired a new director of marketing, so I’m sure we’ll be all over the place before we know it.

Amber Bardon (12:46):
Thank you and thank you for your time today, Teryn!

Teryn Waldenberg (12:48):
Thank you for having me!

Amber Bardon (12:49):
Listeners, if you would like to give us feedback on this episode, if you have an idea or a topic or a partner you’d like to submit for a future episode, you can find us on our website at www.ParasolAlliance.com. Thank you for listening!