Atria Senior Living is empowering older adults with the power of voice

Welcome everybody. I'm so excited to have you here today. I'm joined by my friend and I guess colleague, Chris, and we're going to be talking about how Atria Senior Living has empowered their residents through voice.

There's a lot of technology involved there, a lot of compassion, and a lot of focusing on people. We're gonna go through that today.

To get started, we're gonna talk about this journey. Atria, if you're not aware when we talk about residents, we're referring to senior living communities - so our aging population where they end up when they go from working full time to retirement.

We're gonna talk about Alexa Smart Properties, which is the group I work with and where voice comes into play, and how we went through and formed this plan to enable these residents to empower themselves, make their own choices, control their own day, and connect with those around them.

Before we get started, I do wanna introduce Chris. Let him talk a little bit about himself.

Chris: I'm fortunate to be the Chief Technology Officer at Atria Senior Living. We are based in Louisville, Kentucky and we manage 350 senior living communities with about 40,000 residents. I've got the fun job of how do you not only teach seniors tech, but how do we bring technology to keep them more connected - keep them connected not only within the community but to their adult children, keep them engaged, keep them active.

It's been both a passion project, like many of us have aging parents - they're right on the line of moving into senior living. We're gonna talk a lot about the community aspect, the journey, and then how we've also used this for trying to save staff because like every company, getting staff hired these days is extremely difficult. We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

Stefania: I think the staffing shortage is something we're focused on the residents in this talk, but the staff are also very important.

I'm Stefania Sharp, I'm a product manager with Alexa Smart Properties. You've probably heard of Alexa - it's that device at home that you can yell at to tell you the weather. You can ask it to play music, set routines. What my group does is we focus on how to apply that technology in other areas, like hospitality, healthcare, and senior living.

To get started, it's important to talk about why we're here, why Chris is here, what Atria does. If you think about your progression in life as a sense of community - you start out with community when you're in school, elementary, middle, high school, you create these groups, you see people every day.

Over time, eventually you graduate and go to college, go to work, your access to community starts to diminish. You have to form groups purposefully - I have people I do kpop dance with to create community. That extends into my job - I connect with coworkers on news, TV shows, to stay connected.

That sense of community extends past your job, and that's the group we're talking about today - how do I keep connecting with people? For me, people are essential to my day to day.

What Atria does is empower residents to live their life their own way, together. Their motto is "Live Better Together." Chris, tell us more about Atria - what you provide for residents.

Chris: We have independent living, assisted living, so independent living - these are apartments with activities, trips. This is a good segue into one of our communities. We also have assisted living and memory care communities - we're not nursing homes, where you'll hear me say "communities" a lot because that's important.

We've found people who age together live together longer, and that's been our focus in senior living. You'll hear about engaged life programs - part of this technology we've introduced, we've built it into engagement within and outside the community, with their adult children, their friends, their hobbies.

Introducing this new technology to an audience that grew up with the invention of the phone, mobile phone, internet - but voice has been the easiest because everybody's grown up communicating by talking. It's been an awesome journey partnering with Amazon.

Stefania: To bring it together - Atria provides a sense of community and connection, empowering residents. Alexa Smart Properties is a fleet management solution for Alexa. You can deploy devices in properties - we support hospitality, healthcare, senior living.

Those use cases are very different. One thing I learned working with residents is they have simple use cases I didn't expect - like asking if the mail arrived. Mail is important - it could be letters from loved ones, notices from organizations. Asking staff constantly is hard for them.

That's what Alexa is about - combining communication with automating repetitive tasks, taking workload off staff that could be handled by an assistant. With Alexa Smart Properties, we have fleet management, APIs for the visual experience, communication features. Communication will come up a lot - how do I talk to people outside and inside the community, make requests without a phone, considering visual/dexterity issues.

We also have home cards - displays on the device to convey information without constant reminders.

Why is this important? 24% of community-dwelling Americans 65+ are socially isolated. Isolation leads to health conditions, mortality. Creating community connections for residents is so important.

There's also a staffing shortage, as Chris mentioned. By 2040, all 73 million boomers will likely be retired. Today there are 26 million senior living staff. Projection for 2040 is only 8.3 million. That's about 9 residents per 1 staff member today. With the shrinking staff and growing boomer population, we have to augment staff and enhance the resident experience.

Before we started building anything, it was about the use cases. Atria went big - both visual and voice experiences, all about communication. Chris, my examples are simple - is the mail here yet, what's for lunch? But Atria wanted to tackle much more.

But for you, what were the key use cases? What you really have to nail?

So um the way we approach this was where i i looked at this hospitality plus healthcare. So those are what hospitality use cases are out there with healthcare cases are. So from a hospitality, Alexa, what's for breakfast? What are the entrees? What are the, the? So you start getting in that interactive discussion, then you ask Alexa, what are the activities for today? What are, you know, what, what time is this activity? So you start to, you know, get on the hospitality side.

Uh but then maybe, you know, you're not feeling well. So we, we actually built in skills oe a call, the front desk. So instead of, you know, somebody pushing there, they have these emergency call pendants and if we're licensed, we have to have those and, you know, we do use a lot of those, you know, that where they're not true emergencies, we've started to incorporate the Alexa to, to do that.

Um the other one, the big one is notifications, reminders, but you know, a big use case. Um seniors love paper. They, they love paper. That is, that is gonna be my battle the next few years as i roll more of these out. But if we, if we change our activities for the day, we actually have a system, we change it on the back end, the API feeds, you know, their mobile app, which is not a lot of them have mobile apps, 25% of mobile apps. But in every single room you'll start to see these displays cycling through.

Um and then maybe, you know, maybe Stefani comes to visit, you know, her grandma at one of our communities. Ok. She's at the front desk. They can actually send a message, hey, to that exact room to the exact residence. Hey, Stefani is here and they can also do that if there's another larger activity, you know, for the whole building just reminding people because it's a, a big part of my job is technology to remind people.

Um we wanna, we wanna get people out of their rooms. That's, that's where we see what, you know, longer length of stay longer, you know, extent of life um in my, in my world.

Um the other big use case that we also have and we're not there yet. We're gonna get there eventually. But the seniors that are coming in, they're smart homes, they're, they're leaving a smart home. So we actually have half a dozen communities that Alexa controls their lights, their blinds, their thermostats.

Um so it's starting, if you're staying at the wind, they actually, you know, use the same technology, but we've taken, you know, what, what the wind does, what i know we got disney in the room, some of the things that disney is doing and incorporated on. How do we, how do we help the life of this particular senior um living in our community.

The key thing there is again, uh also having talked with these residents, they're very big. He talks about paper. But what he misses talking about is this giant paper calendar that they print out every week and day. I think that has like, what's going on. What are the activities? I mean, it's just, it's just the old, the, the sense of nostalgia that people are used to holding on to. And so about how do you replace those? Because somebody's got to print them, somebody's got to correct them, somebody's got to put them up all the time. And again, a lot about these intrinsic staffing short savings.

In addition, we keep talking about that bi directional communication. So calling the front desk and sending reminders. So one feature that we found a lot of people enjoy is just the non obtrusive reminders. Something pops up on the screen. It says, hey, just a reminder, your ride's here for your hair appointment at coming up at three. So would you like to have somebody come by and get you and facilitating that interaction?

But the other big thing. So these were the, these are the key use cases and really what came into play, there was finding the right partner for each year because they really got to focus on so many aspects of their communities. And that's where um you ended up selecting Ava as uh somebody to work with. What was it about Ava that really nailed the use cases for you.

So, Ava Health, their um headquartered out of California, they had a lot of experience with the health care industry. They, it rolled these out to hospitals. They were in several senior living communities, but they were, they were re really, we found the leading experts to use the Amazon product in particular.

And you know, i got asked why not use a google product? Why not use an iPad? Well, these are, these are voice enabled and very simple voice enable. Um they're, they're already widely spread, but they're also something that always stays plugged in sounds very simple. But if i roll out 100 and 50 iPads, now we're on, the half of them will get walked out of the building. But the other half won, they plugged in once they charge, that's a massive problem. So putting these in the rooms.

So we really chose Ava because they, they, they came out to our communities and spent time understanding the use cases. They spent time, you know, getting feedback from our residents themselves. We actually have a resident in a san francisco community that used to work at google. And he is probably our, our expert on where they need to take the product journey in particular. And they've, they've been fan fantastic partners on both, you know, the, the ideation, but also how do we you know, where do we go next? Because my, my end users, they're really not gonna tell me where to go next. I have to propose. I have to look at problems that this piece of technology solves and using Ava health in particular. They've, they've, they've done that. They're already solving problems with other communities. They're also solving problems at hotels. So we've really leaned on them to help us drive that product direction for this, you know, particular project.

And that kind of like this partnership coming together with Alexa, with Ava, with Atria. Um we've got our first challenge as it were, is uh it's one thing to put one or two of these devices into your home. It's another thing to put hundreds and deploy them all at once. Um and you're talking about things from having to deal with network traffic and congestion. I know at least one person in this room who has lived this journey. And so, um but cures you not talking about what, what the biggest thing we really partnered on is how to do these deployed on six scale and you actually with Atrio.

So what for everybody in the room? Um one thing to keep in mind is that wi fi is not prolific in senior living communities. As you can imagine, if only 25% are using their cell phones, probably even less care about the internet at this point. Um particularly in europe, there are entire sections of germany, for example, that of the communities have wi fi. So how do we get a device that has no access to wi fi that access? And Atria has been very advanced in this regard.

So what were some of the kind of advantages you had as we were tackling? How do we deploy at scale? So at scale. So i i'll, i'll admit when we started this two years ago, we were first movers, so it was very hands on. But one thing we did was take copious notes of the problems to roll this out at scale. And you know, the biggest problem, first, biggest problem is network. Second, biggest problem is the labor to do this and it was labor intensive and it was a 15 minutes per device.

So if uh i assume everybody here has alexa device, you plug it in on your consumer side, it immediately um authenticates with your amazon account and then it just, you know, what do you want to name the device? Well, fleet managing it, we don't assign it to a consumer. It is assigned to a room, it has its unique serial number and that that process was like i said, 15 minutes long running software updates.

So with Ava and Amazon in particular, we um there's a, there's a phrase called a gemba walk in lean enterprise. It's like walk, you know, walk the problem. Um go out to where the problem is that we actually brought them to a, you know community called the chateau. It's in outside of dallas, texas, 200 rooms. And we showed them like this. This picture is actually, here's how we set these up the first time. We and we did this on purpose to, to identify the pain points. The pain points are, you know, ordering its scale, um unboxing its scale, the setups, the setups themselves manually. One at a time when we did this, this is the first large, one was two a year and a half ago. And then how do we then get those in the rooms, you know, in a, in a way you're, you're introducing and you're introducing something to somebody that's cautious about listening. They're cautious about the box, you have to explain how to use it.

So, um what we did with Amazon Ava is we actually got the process down to about five minutes. We created ad you know, centralized depots where we ordered in mass. They went to a depot configured by Amazon and Ava engineers and then deployed directly to the community. That way when they're at the community that has the wi fi, they already know the ss id, they know the password and they're, they're distributing it to the resident.

And i, i actually intentionally like when i would go to these, i, i didn't want to distribute to the resident. I went the, the care staff, the leadership there because we don't have to look as a, it's a gift as well. It's something that we're giving you. Um we're gonna teach you how to use it and we actually pre would preload their contacts um of some of their adult children, their frequent maybe their doctor that they wanna call all within that device before deploying it.

So, so really packaging that up to, you know, have the wi fi order and mass deploy it and, you know, big surprise where i'm deploying these. I don't have a it manager at a community. Um i'm i'm relying us usually stereotypically. It's the youngest person that works there that is is in charge of it. But we really, we, we have this role called engage life and we made them the champions about this. Um they were the people we chose to give the devices out because they're using this as an engagement device as a device to push communications out.

And that, that was probably like the biggest lesson learned is, you know, we want, we, we don't want you to think this is a, you know, a spying device, a passive check in device, this is something to engage. This is a new piece of technology and by the way, it comes with your room, you're not paying extra to, to use this. So it was, you know, definitely we went from our, you know, 1st 300 devices up to costa 1800 right now uh with a very streamlined process, you know, partnering with Ava and Amazon in particular.

And you talk briefly about, you know, we're talking about technologically, how do we get these devices out at scale? But the big thing that Chris just touched on is how do i get them adopted at scale. And so he alluded to some of these site champions, some of these engaged life uh leaders, Chris, what was the, your secret sauce? You know, you kind of told us like you guys figure out how to deploy quickly. We'll figure out how to get it adopted. What was your secret sauce?

Um um in working with the communities in addition to these, ours was when you think of any community, you've got the most social people of a community, whether it's grade school, high school university. So at, at every community there's we, we, they, we call them champions, but they're resident ambassadors. They're the ones if you know chris moves in. I'm, i'm, i'm having breakfast with chris. I'm introducing chris to other residents. So they're, i i'd say they're, they're where they're the influencers, the community.

So we would, you know, we'd approach it with first the leadership, get them behind it and selling the, you know, engagement side, the communication usage. Hey, by the way, if you wanna send something to 200 rooms, you're not printing off paper and you're walking into every room, you're just pushing a, you know, they're called cards on the screen you're just changing what's on their screen. It's that interim digital signage.

So we get the leadership on board excited. We typically give out a few Alexis. Hey, you know, take it home, get comfortable with it, you know, come back to me with some ideas. But really, the resident champions were the ones where we, we would build use cases of what's a problem you have, you know, with, you know, simple one, i don't know how to use this

"Well, we would create, you know, artifacts like handouts for them. We actually create, you know, whole hour programs on, you know, main uses of Alexa. But you know, the also thing, awesome thing with Alexa is Alexa can teach the resident. So there, you know, I, I love the phrase that Amazon uses catapult events. So Alexa, what's going on today and it would just, it starts their day, you know, well, today it's 75 degrees out and we're serving, you know, fried chicken for lunch and we're so that, that would, we would push that out to the screen and that would start to engage the residents and it all really started with the um the champions. Uh and then locally we would really start to sell the staff on, ok. Use this for a happy birthday, use this for a tour push, you know, welcome Chris Nall to room 201. And that way when, when it's a, it's a diff anybody who's had to, you know, move a relative into senior living. It is a very like traumatic experience, you know, they, the 1st 30 60 90 days are extremely important.

So what, what we try to do is use this to make them feel comfortable and make them feel at home. Um make that, make it not intimidating. But then also on, on the flip side, like how can we for their id eight for them? And then the ro i, you know, this is the big one that we are. You know, i'm i, we manage for, they're called reits real estate trusts. Um what, what is the ro i and for, for me, the some of the big rois are engagement. So how do i, how do i move the needle of people attending activities um occupancy. So if somebody wanting to move in my community because there's something unique about that that keeps them engaged.

Um the other rl i is really targeted the adult children, hey, by, you know, you could, you could buy your parents one of these, you could set it up for them, but we will do that for you. We're gonna set it up, it's gonna be preloaded with your contact info, it's gonna be preloaded with all the activities and, and you know, this is another thing we're doing for mom and dad to make them feel very comfortable moving into our community.

All right. So we, we talked about kind of like deploying at scale adoption at scale. And I'm sure some people in the room are wondering what exactly does, where does AWS come into play? What exactly does that look like? Uh so I'm gonna give you a very large architecture diagram. I want a typical Alexa interaction in a community trying to serve this type of content might look like.

Um so typically there's multiple ways you can push and pull content from an Echo device. Um here, you'll see something we have called Alexa skills and to explain what Alexa skills are. I like to think of them as like applications have on your phone. We like to think of them as well skills that Alexa knows how to do. She can tell you the weather, she can adjust your thermostat, she can do various things like that. Anything that has an API essentially can become an Alexa skill.

Um and then to kind of take that a step further, we think about everything in terms of what we call utterances, things that you would say what was really important in working with Atria and looking at those use cases is what, what do we expect the users to say? And what do we expect them to say a lot? Because those are the use cases you have to get right. The first time Alexa is the male here, you'll notice also if you interact with a device at home, regardless of voice assistant, usually you have to say, you know, Alexa ask uh ask Atria, what's for lunch today? You have to invoke that application by its name.

Um in our scenario in Alexis Smart Properties, we actually offer a name, free interaction experience for those core use cases. So it really is key. Ok? What do we think they'll say naturally and in senior living communities, they're not gonna remember these very complex utterances. So it has to be very simple. So breaking that down an utterance, like what's for lunch? I like to think of them. When we build skills, they have something called an interaction model and they contain intents. Think of those as verbs, somebody's asking what is they're looking for information as well as slots, think of those as nouns. Lunch would be a slot in this case.

And so in this flow, you look at the bottom skill. Um the resident has asked what's for lunch that's translated from speech into text. And then our automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding system tries to break down, what are they trying to do? It will then see that Atria has an experience built by Ava that can handle menus and dining and all those options, it will send the request off and this is where AWS comes into play into Lambda.

Um people use Lambda, they will use uh functions, they will use, you can use pretty much anything where you can host backend code and then they may start to interact with the Alexis Smart Proper system. This is where we do personalization you'll see on here, something called the Unit A PS. So what Ava can do is they can look up this request came from this random identifier. Let me go figure out which room made the request, not which user but which room they can use that to then interact with your system to personalize the request. Hey Betty um happy birthday. By the way. Also your favorite for lunch is gonna be available today. We also know that you like the flan uh and that will be for dinner tonight so they can personalize the request. But without ever having to put that personalization within the Alexa or AWS ecosystem.

In addition, as far as pushing things, we talked about those cards or those ambient experiences. So let's say I want to let people know there's an emergency fire drill happening or I think I've heard more than once about the boiler has broken down and people are very concerned that not getting timely updates about that. I've heard a lot of complaints about things breaking down the residents, not getting communication so they could send a notification on the screen using our proactive suggestion. A PS. They just send a text message up on the screen. They could also push full visual content. Hey, here's a big warning message. Um here is the text um and it'll stay up on the screen until they dismiss it that way they can get alerts or ambient communication through those means.

And a lot of times it's just something as simple as get me a background image, give me some text and push it on to one or select number of devices. Um so think about Alexa skills as ways to do those back and forth interactions with third party systems. And that's what we built today. In addition, we talked about the communications features. So this is something that's also unique to Alexa Smart Properties over just the Alexa you have at home. You can certainly use Alexa to say, call my aunt, call my mom if they're another Alexa user. But in addition, we recently actually launched an Atria is using our WebRTC suite of APIs where now they can have caregiver applications, they can have applications that the adult children can have access to, to do both video and voice chat.

Um you can have more elaborate discussions with external systems like the front desk or maybe calling a doctor outside. Um this way, they don't have to worry about the person on the receiving end, having an Alexa or vice versa and just makes the communication a little bit easier. So here you can see how you could do this, not quite how Atria has set it up. Um we have customers using uh you know, Amazon's Chime SDK to do those digital connections. They will embed an application in their website. They can do telehealth, they could just do, hey, I just want to call my mom today and then it would, uh, the video would come up on the Echo Show device. In addition, the feature they're not quite using yet is our Private Branch Exchange. So that's just where you can connect to PBX in with your existing Alexis Properties deployment.

All right. Well, we've talked a lot about the technology. We've talked about how they built it. We talked about the challenges of scale and adoption and, and really, it's, it's talking about like it's one thing to build something. It's another thing to get people to use it, which I think is a problem we can all relate to. Um but there's a lot of Chris and I are talking about how we thought this was successful, how it felt good for us. But I think it's helpful to also hear from, hear from the residents. And so we do have a video that kind of captures one of the communities that was impacted by having Alexa so little context. This is HR Newport Beach based in, you know, right by Newport New, a beautiful Newport Beach for anybody's familiar with it. Um independent living, assisted living and memory care. So it's, it's about 202 150 apartments now. So it's a pretty, pretty large community, a lot of walking around, not quite the wind, not quite that much walking, but it is it is something that we've really tried to, you know, help the staff out, help the residents out and then push that information out. So this is a, a fun thing we did earlier this year. Um in partnership with Amazon, it's so easy. All they have to do is use their voice.

Alexa, what activities are tomorrow? I found seven events. Atria Senior Living is 400 communities strong across the US and Canada, we're the intersection of hospitality, health care and well being. With technology being the glue that holds it together. Atria Newport Beach is a lifestyle community, great dining, great activities, great care. So really life style amenities that match people who've had amazing, wonderful lives. And the most important thing is to maintain their independence as they age. Our competitors talk about providing nutrition and housing and it's not enough. What we're learning is the secret ingredient for aging is discovering new things throughout your life.

I can answer lots of questions about today and what's going on and she's really up to date on everything we used to have encyclopedias that we had to read, to find out answers to our questions. And now we just ask her quality is at the heart of everything we do. What that means is we are part of their extended family. So we're not only a home for them, we're the friends that they're going to make. We're the activities that they're going to have. It's introducing technology that will help our residents stay connected and helping them to grow with their curiosity, but also giving them that feeling of independence at Amazon. We build for older adults focus around technology leveraging Alexa and we're in and really creating solutions. They're transferring the experience on aging at Alexa Smart Properties. We're seeing that the intuitive nature of voice increases the adoption of technology with older adults and residents as well as the staff and associates.

I tell my friends, Alexa is not intimidating. It's so simple. That's the thing. That's surprising because many of the new techie things we have to learn about are kind of confusing and there's nothing confusing about her by implementing Echo Show devices in our residents' homes. We've been able to use voice technology to not only keep our residents engaged with the outside world but engaged within our community. We've built custom Alexa skills specific to HR C building communities activities, culinary experiences, Alexa, what's the entree for dinner? Atria. Voice assistant for entree. Today we have shrimp scampi with pasta. Oh, I love that.

Alexa is a game changer for residents because it lets them know all of the activities that are going on. They simply ask Alexa, it's easier because there's lots of things i don't have to look up. And since i wear reading glasses and i have to find my glasses to look things up with Alexa, i don't have to do that. I can just ask Alexa, the question of the day that i want at that moment, partnering with Amazon who also share our innovative spirit has allowed us to quickly move into voice technology to drive more engagement within our Atria, Engage Life events and excite staff. It's a piece of technology that they are very familiar with in their personal lives and we've curated it for our senior living communities.

Alexa call the concierge call, concierge's phone. Good afternoon"

Thank you for calling me to Newport Beach. This is Heidi Heidi. I'm waiting for dry cleaning to be delivered. Will you see that? It comes to my room?

Oh, yes, absolutely. Thank you.

You're welcome.

When an older adult engages with technology, their life becomes transformed. I've heard them say it's like I've been living in a black and white world and now I'm in technicolor.

I had a beautiful experience when we first introduced Alexa. So I have a couple here and they've been married since the late fifties. And I asked them, what was their wedding song? They had not heard it in at least 20 years and they used to play it many, many times. Alexa was able to play the song. It gave them back that moment for most voice.

Technology seems super simple. Partnering with Amazon has allowed us to bring this to an enterprise level and scale it up for all 400 of our communities, a level that no other competitor in senior living has been able to do. The Alexas have enabled us to drive further engagement and provide an industry leading experience for our residents. We've actually seen a 50% to 75% increase in participation in Patria, engaged life events, getting our residents out of their rooms while at the same time keeping them connected to their children through voice calls, through video calls. And we've made it easy. All they have to do is ask Alexa.

Oh, and that was Spring Crest, not Winter Chris right now. So that's a big, big difference.

Well, uh you know, a little background story, I had to watch that video 10 times. So I wouldn't tear up on stage at the part where they talk about the wedding song. Um I was unsuccessful if anybody noticed. But um it, it really is touching to hear about just how the residents are able to connect with each other with memories from the past with on site staff, how they're able to just be independent and, and kind of going into that further is what kind of results have you seen in terms of you were looking about? How do we increase engagement? So that the ga you know, you heard me mention 50 75% engagement that is happened at every single community. We've introduced this at once before, you know, we had uh uh you know, easy numbers. We had five people showing up for an event pushed out Alexa notifications, 25 showed up. So some of them are, are much larger, but it is a, a significant jump in participation.

Um we have emergency call devices. So I talked about staffing uh emergency call devices. People would use to ask questions. People just would use it to stay connected, not for emergency calls. And every one of those we would have to, you know, leave the front desk, go up there, check on the room, make sure, make sure they're ok. Um some, most, some of our communities were seeing 30 to 50% reduction because they're, they're using Alexa for that interaction. They're using Alexa to call the front desk.

Um and then, you know, outbound calls, that is something that is continuing to grow. Um the, the, you know, the adult children are the ones that really love it because it's, it's preprogrammed with their number. They can call in the mom's device, mom can call them back easily. And then as, as we look at like the programming side, you know, how, how do we teach them to, you know, the number one usage is music but you know, you heard the encyclopedia example, how do we educate our residents on? You can actually ask Alexa, you know, one of them who is, you know, vice president to Gerald Ford. I mean, they, we were some of these questions we were getting hit with, you know, they were loving it, they were loving the interaction, they're loving how easy it is to use.

And, you know, as we look at, um, the o the other piece of it is these devices today. Um i, i use the 30% of our residents have a cell phone, 100% have this in their room and of the 100% every other day they're used. So, you know, think about you, you give, you, give your parents a piece of technology and they never use it. It just sits there. Well, the, these are, these are being used to answer questions to call each other. They're, and, and we could follow that data and see that it is, it is, you know, starting to gain more traction is more and more, see more and more of the, you know, aging population that grew up with these devices moves in our communities. They're, they're really gonna treat this as a utility. It's gonna be, you know, as if a tv or cable or wi fi was included. They're gonna look for a voice assistant.

And, um, you know, Linda Linda was pretty awesome adapter uh adopter of this, you know, she, um we filmed for a couple of days with her but um, it's, it's not intimidating. It is, you know, they've, people have been talking their whole life, well, usually, usually from like, you know, a year and a half on. But um, it doesn't, it's, it's not a thing they can talk to it in private. They can talk to it in public. They don't, people don't feel embarrassed and that, that's probably one of the most awesome thing, feedback we've gotten is, you know, hey, i don't, you've given me something that you don't really need to train me on it. Uh, you know, i can just read what's on the screen. I can read what's on the card and it's, it's, you know, it, it is truly simple as plug and play once we get this up and moving and they're really good sources of feedback for you as well. I mean, you've had the, the intrinsic value of being able to open up these communications but, and, and this is not something you were necessarily aiming to track, but what have you seen in terms of your staff? And, and what kind of like, you know, hope does it give you in order for alleviating uh that staffing shortage as well?

So our staff is extremely excited about this because, you know, say you go in a room and somebody's having a bad day, you ask Alexa to play jazz music. Ok? Now we start to calm the room down. I, i have, i have an assistant helping me, you know, cheer up the residents. Um i have an assistant helping me, you know, get them engaged in something that's gonna make them happy. So I think from a staff happiness, we've seen that raise. We do, we do staff surveys maybe 20 25% of, you know, oh, at communities that have Amazon Alexas versus no Amazon Alexas.

Um, so it's been kind of remarkable seeing that, you know, happen as part of this roll out as well, which was unintended. The other unintended usage of this was, it's not, it's not a medical device. It's not, you know, i said earlier, i don't use it for emergency calls, but people don't carry their pendant everywhere. Pe, you know, it's our, our residents want to be independent and we, we've had several examples of somebody's falling and they don't have their p it's, it's far away, there's no pool court. So they've called out for help using Alexa to call in the front desk and we've been able to get staff there quickly. So it's just uh another, you know, additional benefit of, you know, the safety side of where we, where we've been able to take this product in the last two years.

And so that's, that's kind of where Atria has come today. And, and thank you Chris and just following this journey from, you know, we came up with some ambitious but great use cases all the way to the challenges of making the deployment. Um and this is an ongoing journey as well like we're continuing to work with the community. So Chris kind of go into some of the future of what Atria is planning to do next year and, and beyond.

So you saw does have an Alexa show 15 at your house. Just all right. I, i have them as well. I love it. We were the first in the world to use those as portable digital signage. I wanna say first in the world as soon as we saw that product coming out of the Amazon, you know, we came up, hey, we, we want these bigger Alexas at communities where we don't have the wi fi yet in the rooms. So we're, we're starting to roll these out is a portal and anybody who's ever bought a digital sign, they're, they're 2 to $3000 and then you've got content updated. Our digital signs are using back in API s that we've already planned events for and it's feeding these individual Alexa show fifteens. So that is, that is one area, um staff communication.

So we've got a pilot running now where we've, you know, it goes back to the a at the community, there's just not enough staff. So at our headquarters, what can we automate and push out to these devices? So we're actually putting Alexa show fifteens in break rooms. So it's annual enrollment time. It's employee survey time. We can push a qr code if we wanna, you know, get a voice of the voice of the staff instantaneously. Versus in the past, you'd have to send a survey out to their personal email. Maybe they don't fill it out, maybe you don't get that interaction. So we're using them, you know, on the fifteens in particular.

Um the other place is the API integration. So we've got a company, they're called Align. They are senior centric focus technology company. They actually my predecessor at Atria is the CTO of that company. They were part of Atria, but they built a lot of, you know, i think er pc rm you know, back in optimization of senior living communities. So um Align has been our major partner on, you know, the planning technology, the meal technology, we actually are are looking what more API s can we start to pull in to personalize the experience to drive that? You know, my my end goal is this is used, you know, 34 times a day and when it's used 34 times a day, i can start to collect that data and say that Chris is having a good day or Chris is engaged or i could then direct my staff to the 25% of people who haven't used Alexa today. Ok. That's, that's who you need to go check on. That's who you need to go. Make sure they're, you know, number one, they're healthy. Two. Are they happy? Three? Is there something we can do for them? Because you know, the staff, you know, they're running all around, they, they don't have the time to, you know, look at a report, say what that report tells them. They they that automation.

So the, the passive check ins, you know, that's, that's where we're really pushing, you know, for 2024 with this particular device because we want, we want to use it to really augment that staff. But we also wanna get that two way communication and near real time. Um just to, you know, like i said, you know, people age better when they're together, age better when they're happier and the sooner we can understand that and leveraging this piece of technology to get that information, you know, the faster we can get our staff up there and, and talking to that particular resident.

Hello. So it's really about, you know, how do you facilitate more communication next year? How do you do things passively? We talked about, you know, the residents don't like people interjecting on them. And so the biggest thing is, is how can you offer more at this point? So, um we've had a beautiful journey working with Atria. I'm loving, continuing to work with the communities. I just love to see people who are able to connect with their, their dreams and their visions and other residents. And um looking forward to seeing how this vision continues to evolve as, as we work with Atria and, and with Ava going forward.

And I wanna thank everybody for following us through this journey. Um we're happy to answer any questions afterwards, but otherwise, thank you Chris for joining me today and thank you everybody for hearing about our story.

Uh, thank you all. This has been awesome. It's been, you know, it's as a, as a CTO, I've worked in industrial companies. I worked in pizza industry and, uh, you know, it's a passion project because, you know, i, i feel it personally with aging parents and, you know, the more we can, the more we can take off, you know, an adult child, he's already going through a traumatic experience, moving his parent into a community. Um, the better. So it's just something that's, you know, we take a lot of pride in it and, you know, loving our partnership with Amazon, loving our partnership with Ava as well. So, thank you everybody.