Smart Spaces Recap | PropTech Market Evolution: Senior Living
Parks Associates
Internationally recognized consumer IoT market research firm studying connected home and entertainment trends
What demographic can benefit from robot cats, virtual reality, and a new class of AI?
You guessed it, seniors!
Read more to connect the dots through key research findings and executive insights into technology for senior multifamily housing from our Smart Spaces virtual session, “PropTech Market Evolution: Senior Living.”
Learn more about Smart Spaces here!
Multifamily & Senior Living Research
Our Director of Research, Kristen Hanich , opened the event by presenting research on multifamily property technologies and senior living.
Kristen drew from two major studies we did in the past year:
?? Senior Living - Technology for Safety and Independence, which looked at both senior and family caregiver adoption of technologies and solutions for independent living.
?? Smart Apartments: Connectivity and Services in MDUs, a study we did in the multifamily space looking at smart apartments, connectivity, and services.
Through our research in these areas, we’ve come upon some key findings that are very important to anyone operating in this space:
?? Today’s seniors are more tech adept than in the past.
?? Smart device use cases resonate with seniors but need to be messaged appropriately.
?? Beyond amenities, operations benefit heavily from smart tech.
Insights from our Smart Spaces Visionary Spotlight speakers on the future of technology in senior multifamily housing and the government funding behind it!
Industry leaders John P. Reinhart with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and Sheri Rose , CEO of Thrive Center Inc. shared their insights on innovating and investing in senior technology during their Visionary Spotlight session!
? The key element of aging is that it’s multifaceted. When you merge quality of life with quality of care, you end up with this misunderstanding of which way you’re selling and to whom you are selling. For instance, if you have something that’s reimbursable by insurance, then you also have an influencer which could be an adult child or physician, so the user is not always the direct buyer.
? Most businesses fail to understand revenue models and the nuances between acuity levels of care. You have long-term care, skilled nursing, and then you get into memory care and hospice. On the other side, you have independent living, assisted living, and everything in between. But the issue is those have cognitive, physical, and spiritual dynamics of the person in those phases. People don’t fully absorb those dynamics when they try to go to market.
? NIH has 27 divisions, and the NIA is one of them. Our division awards over 140 million dollars annually in grants for research called SBIR & STTR grants, typically to seasoned scientists and leaders with for-profit ventures. My role is to be an advisor to the portfolio, I call it “shortening the gestation cycle of commercialization”, to ensure the business model and viability of their solution is sound.
? The PPP loans and the Employee Retention Credit loans helped keep a lot of startups moving forward.?We’ve seen a huge uptick in SBIR grants, which are non-dilutive and help foster innovation. They start at $500,000 in Phase I and can go to $2-4 million in Phase II. A lot of the government and state sectors are looking at grant programs likewise. In senior living and skilled nursing, there are also Civil Money Penalty (CMP) funds.?
? We are co-founders of the Thrive Center. We had a concept of building a nonprofit center that accelerates innovation and aging, makes it immersive, takes fear out of technology for adults, and engages in partnerships. We also make it accessible to a lot of students who are looking to go into geriatrics and aging care.
? We are seeing a shift at the state level to take better care of older adults and look at the technologies that can give them a better quality of life. The State of Connecticut reached out to the Thrive Center because they were looking at putting out an RFA so they could focus on home and community-based services to care for their aging adults. We saw the State of New York purchase 800 ElliQs, which are social companion robots, because of loneliness and isolation and the impact on dementia for that.?
Insights from leading executives on how tech-enabled properties are shaping the future of senior living (plus a robot cat!)
PropTech offers a range of innovations that can enhance the quality of life for seniors, including:
Industry experts explored how technology is revolutionizing senior living environments, enabling personalized care, enhancing safety, and improving quality of life for older adults during our Smart Spaces virtual panel, “New Era of Senior Living: Tech-enabled Properties.”
?? Elizabeth "Libby" Welch Anderson , Director of Orange County Ombudsman Program, Council on Aging - Southern California ??
? We received a grant and decided to embark on a project to distribute 200 robotic pets to various assisted living and skilled nursing facilities. We wanted residents to have something to interact with and could respond to them. It didn’t really matter at the end of the day if the pet was “real”, what mattered was that they had something to love and have companionship with.
?Anything that makes things easier for and is accessible to residents in long-term care will make their lives better. Telemedicine certainly does that, but I also just heard about one of the high-end long-term care facilities here in Orange County where they have implemented Amazon Alexa. It has really resonated with the residents but requires a lot – it requires the funding to do it and a full-time tech manager on the property.?
?? Navin Gupta , CEO, iN2L + LifeLoop ??
? There’s an emphasis on wellness and preventative healthcare versus just rehabilitative care. All of the emotional, physical, spiritual, and social dimensions of wellness are important in addition to the management of chronic and cognitive conditions.
? I can get really excited about technology, but realistically, you need to look at what end it provides. In 1970, 5% of the federal budget was redirected toward healthcare, and today it’s almost one-third. We have to be able to really innovate in order to bend the cost curve of healthcare spending. Everyone in this space is working towards that. What I’m personally excited about is the use of data to drive better outcomes for the resident experience, including indexing wellness at a community level, improving the average length of stay, and creating an Electronic Health Record equivalent for tracking dimensions of wellness.??
?? Dr. Eric L. Luster, D.B.A , CEO, Movement Interactive Inc ??
? Leveraging the ecosystem of technology to deliver more than one solution is extremely important. Sensors do more for fall detection and prevention when you tie them into smart lighting. Some independent seniors weren’t reporting falls because they were reluctant to be sent to dependent care, so we wanted to deliver more solutions around falls. We just completed a study with the NSF BRAIN to identify residents that have degradation in gait, then improve resiliency and reaction time by exposing them to falls.
? It took a lot of planning and using the collaborations and resources available to make enhancements to the infrastructure at Waymark Gardens. We knew we needed to build a business case around it, and it had to be sustainable. We are an affordable property and had a HUD (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development) Section 202 loan that we transitioned to a HUD 223(f) renovation loan. In the planning phases of that, we built a telemedicine solution as part of the renovation based on feedback from our residents that they were afraid to rely solely on their loved ones to take them to their appointments. The developers thought we were crazy until COVID hit.?
?? Aparna Pujar , Founder and CEO, Zemplee Inc ??
? I created Zemplee after becoming a remote caregiver for my aging parents. One of the things I noticed in the industry as a technologist was the severe shortage of tools that would actually help caregivers across all settings. One challenge we see across these settings is the infrastructure, so we became a plug-and-play system that doesn’t depend on Wi-Fi capabilities and connects directly to cellular towers.
? One thing we’re working on is creating a new class of AI, which we call attentive AI. So, there’s generative AI dependent on data to create content, but what we’re looking at is AI technology focused on the attentiveness and the assistance required to enable a person to live independently and self-manage in an intelligent way. The goal is to preventatively interject situational advice through smart technology.