At California senior living centers run by the nonprofit Eskaton, technology use is up among seniors looking to fend off loneliness. Their changing habits shed new light on why some tools like voice assistants are more useful than others.

By: Stephanie Condon

April 17, 2020

At the Eskaton assisted living communities across Northern California, residents and staff are doing their best to create a shared sense of hope and solidarity through the COVID-19 pandemic.

To keep residents safe, communal rooms are closed for activities, but hallway happy hours have become a common occurrence. Residents must eat their meals in their own apartments, but the staff has treated them with door-to-door candy deliveries. Visitors are no longer permitted on premises, but tools like messaging apps and videoconferencing are helping residents feel connected to their loved ones.

Across Eskaton’s more than 30 communities, the nonprofit was “lucky to have a lot of the infrastructure in place, the tools available, for residents and family members to transition to new ways of communication,” Ten Brinke added.

Eight of Eskaton’s assisted living communities, serving a total of more than 400 residents, have deployed K4Community, a platform that delivers a range of tools and services for both residents and employees at senior living centers. Residents have used the platform in noticeably different ways since the COVID-19 outbreak first appeared in California, ten Brinke said. Over a 30-day period beginning in early March, residents actively using communications tools increased usage over 3X in comparison to the 30 days prior. The K4Community app also saw a 12 percent increase in usage from Eskaton residents’ family and friends.

The new habits residents are picking up underscore why some technologies have resonated with seniors in assisted living, while others fall flat. Tools like AI-powered voice assistants, ten Brinke said, provide a more inherently engaging platform for seniors looking for stronger connections to their communities.

“In terms of accessibility, it’s leveraging the skills that are most natural. Talking is really natural, and we all know how to do it,” ten Brinke said. And as you get better at using voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, “Alexa gets better understanding you. As you’re interfacing with her, she’s getting better, and it’s like you’re both learning together, so it’s encouraging you to continue using it.”

When Eskaton started rolling out Amazon Echo devices in residents’ rooms as part of the K4Community platform, it saw quick uptake — nearly 100 percent of residents in one community were regularly using the devices, ten Brinke said. Eskaton had planned to deploy Alexa at two additional communities this year and hastened the deployment in response to the pandemic. Residents are using the voice assistant to call family members, to keep up to speed with community news and just to hear jokes, among other things.

“The executive directors felt that it could be a tool to decrease and mitigate the risk of social isolation,” ten Brinke said.

By contrast, the messaging apps and teleconferencing tools available to Eskaton residents via K4Community held little interest for residents who couldn’t get their family members to log on — a factor that’s changing under the current circumstances.

“Unless we had sustained engagement from family members, it was hard to continue to give residents a reason to pick up that tablet every single day,” ten Brinke said. “A lot of communities discontinued using them because they didn’t see as high of adoption, but in this healthcare crisis, we’ve seen a huge increase in demand for tablets and connecting one-on-one with individuals.”

Videoconferencing has been a particular delight to seniors who were previously unfamiliar with digital communication tools, Ten Brinke said. “They can’t believe they’re seeing multiple family members at one time when historically that may not have been happening except during the holidays,” she said.

As seniors overcome the learning curve associated with new tools, “it’ll be interesting to see once visitation restrictions are lifted, if we’ll see that desire to continue connecting virtually,” ten Brinke said. “It’s been really neat for us to see that high level of family of engagement on a virtual level.”

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Read it on ZDNet, here!

Our weekly newsletter series, the COVID-911 Bulletin, provides additional guidance and resources on how K4Community tools can be leveraged to serve residents and their families.

By: Mary Ann Azevedo

April 7, 2020

Unfortunately, since the coronavirus pandemic has escalated, we’ve written a lot about startups that have had to lay off employees.

Those stories are as painful for us to write as they are for you to read. But there is some encouraging news to share.

Last week, I reported on startup Better.com’s goal to hire laid off hospitality workers (like 150 a month) to help it meet increased demand for its digital lending offering. I also covered Pager and hims & hers’ boosting their telehealth offerings to help alleviate the strain on the current health care infrastructure.

Over the weeks, I’ve also received tons of emails about companies trying to give back to their communities, or help laid off workers, or just help people in general during this unsettling and (very) scary global health crisis.

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K4Connect

This Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup has developed a solution to help create smart senior living communities. The K4Connect team has created a weekly newsletter series—the COVID-911 Bulletin—to provide additional guidance and resources on how K4Community tools can be leveraged to serve residents and their families. The newsletter can be accessed here.

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Read the full story on Crunchbase, here where Mary Ann shares her full list of startups working to support people around the world as COVID-19 continues.

K4Connect teams up with Tony Award-winning Broadway actress to bring musical and theater performances to thousands of older adults with #SunshineSongs initiative.

 

April 6, 2020

RALEIGH — Social isolation isn’t easy, especially for older adults. Considered the most “at risk” of severe illness related to COVID-19, many aged 65 are shutting themselves in senior living facilities to protect themselves from contracting the virus.

But Raleigh startup K4Connect is hoping to offer some respite.

The mission-driven technology company that creates technology solutions centered to help older adults and individuals with disabilities, has teamed up with Tony Award winner and Broadway actress Laura Benanti, who has started an initiative called #SunshineSongs with her friend, Kate Deiter-Maradei, at Raleigh-based Deiter Mediation.

They’re asking anyone — kids, famous individuals —  to send in performance videos for those especially isolated during the quarantine to help them battle loneliness.

The videos will then be curated into K4Connect’s flagship solution, K4Community, where 29,000 older adult residents at over 125 senior living communities will be able to access, for free.

“This enables individuals who don’t have access to social media networks to access some lighthearted entertainment during social distancing,” said Patrick Reilly, a spokesperson for the company.

K4Connect is the leading provider of enterprise-grade technologies for senior living communities. The company’s patented (28 US patents to-date) operating system, FusionOS, on which K4Community is built, is the first and only of its kind in senior living.

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Read the story on WRAL TechWire, here!

K4Connect has launched COVID-911, a company-wide initiative to accelerate product development and customer communications to support them through the crisis. 

By: Suzanne Blake

March 31, 2020

The technology market serving seniors and senior living facilities has been growing for years, but Covid-19 puts an increased emphasis on the need for the elderly to have access to quality technology. Triangle-based startups Roobrik, Viibrant and K4Connect are all meeting those needs in these difficult times.

Raleigh-based K4Connect’s CEO Scott Moody said K4Connect saw the pandemic coming. As the leader of K4Connect, a startup that creates smart solutions for older adults and people with disabilities, Moody said he’s been working hundred-hour weeks for the past month to address the needs of senior living communities during this time.

Moody said that in late February, K4Connect launched COVID-911, a company-wide initiative to accelerate product development and customer communications to support them through this crisis. 

Residents in senior living homes, meanwhile, are facing new challenges every day from Covid-19. In addition to Covid-19’s potential increased severity on this group, seniors are being isolated from the physical engagement of their surrounding communities and loved ones. That makes K4Connect’s tech enabling communication more important that ever.

Employees in senior living facilities also face new challenges, as they must make difficult decisions such as whether they should go to work with even mild symptoms that could be related to allergies or a simple cold—or could be Covid-19. With a shortage of testing, it’s hard to know the difference.

K4Connect has continued its mission to keep senior residents engaged and informed along with smart home technology, which also allows monitoring to make sure a senior resident is doing all right based on their light or thermostat usage, Moody said. K4Connect offers 24/7 support and currently has a number of no-cost capabilities, including a virtual morning check-in for residents.

“You find a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, I have something you can use’, but inside the community, it’s like, ‘Who’s going to put this all together? Who’s going to download all these apps? Who’s going to train everybody? How do we know what people are doing?’” Moody said. “And that’s what we do. We bring all these great technologies together.”

Smith said that Viibrant, being a technology company, had a fairly easy transition to remote work. But there’s been an increase in customer need for services related to dining, like providing virtual menus for facilities as they’ve closed dining facilities and turned to to-go ordering and food delivery.

Still, Smith said the world and national economy will take a blistering impact from Covid-19, but some startups can offer hope.

“When when you have a crisis like this,” Smith said, “you’re going to find other tech startups that bring hope, that bring value, that bring a product, that bring solutions.”

Moody, who previously founded and led the company AuthenTec—responsible for the technology now used in Apple’s Touch ID—through the dotcom crisis and the Great Recession, said startups have two ways to look at navigating these times: managing during the crisis and leading through the crisis. Leading could ultimately be what defines the success of your startup.

“I believe—and our company believes—that if you serve others, if you do good, then good things will happen,” Moody said. “I think for any startup, they have to look at ‘how do I manage through the crisis,’ but probably more importantly is ‘how do I lead through the crisis’ and come out a stronger, better company, and often a changed company than we were at the beginning of the crisis. And so many people forget about that kind of leadership activity. It’s the difference between a manager and a leader.”

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Read the full article on GrepBeat, here!

K4Connect and customer, Rich Williams, HHHunt SVP of Senior Living, spoke with the New York Times about how senior living residents are leaning on technology during COVID-19.

By: Erin Griffith and Kate Conger

March 27, 2020

As life has increasingly moved online during the pandemic, an older generation that grew up in an analog era is facing a digital divide. Often unfamiliar or uncomfortable with apps, gadgets and the internet, many are struggling to keep up with friends and family through digital tools when some of them are craving those connections the most.

While teenagers are celebrating birthdays over Zoom with one another, children are chatting with friends over online games and young adults are ordering food via delivery apps, some older people are intimidated by such technology. According to a 2017 Pew Research study, three-quarters of those older than 65 said they needed someone else to set up their electronic devices. A third also said they were only a little or not at all confident in their ability to use electronics and to navigate the web.

That is problematic now when many people 65 and older, who are regarded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as most at risk of severe illness related to the coronavirus, are shutting themselves in. Many nursing homes have closed off to visitors entirely. Yet people are seeking human interaction and communication through the web or their devices to stave off loneliness and to stay positive.

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In nursing homes that have stopped visitors from coming in to limit the spread of the virus, workers are leaning on tech to help residents stay connected with their families.

At 23 senior living communities in North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia run by Spring Arbor Senior Living, workers have been triaging family calls — sometimes multiple ones a day per resident — over Apple’s FaceTime, Skype and a software system operated by K4Connect, a tech provider, said Rich Williams, a senior vice president at HHHunt, which owns the centers.

“That line of communication is essential to the resident’s well-being,” he said.

Mr. Williams added that workers had also used virtual activities like Nintendo’s Wii bowling and SingFit, a music singalong program, to help Spring Arbor’s 1,450 residents — whose average age is 88 — pass the time and stay active.

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Read the full New York Times piece, here!

Kate Conger is a technology reporter in San Francisco, covering privacy, policy and labor. Previously, she wrote about cybersecurity for Gizmodo and TechCrunch. @kateconger

Erin Griffith reports on technology start-ups and venture capital from the San Francisco bureau. Before joining The Times she was a senior writer at WIRED and Fortune. @eringriffith

The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting the senior care industry in unimagined ways, and likely will for the foreseeable future. As the crisis progresses, marketing and sales teams may find themselves busier than ever in a job that normally entails face-to-face interaction.

By: Chuck Sudo

March 23, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting the senior care industry in unimagined ways, and likely will for the foreseeable future. In spite of lockdowns and precautionary measures taken by operators and owners across the country, however, senior living communities remain open for business — and sales and marketing teams are remaining busy but working in drastically different ways than usual.

As the crisis progresses, marketing and sales teams may find themselves busier than ever in a job that normally entails face-to-face interaction. They will need to work remotely, leverage tech into their marketing and sales strategies, set up virtual tours and incorporate their communities’ responses to protecting residents from contracting the virus into the sales process. Third-party referral platforms are also adjusting in response to Covid-19.

Low-key tech solutions

Being nimble with marketing plans and how they are implemented also serves the residents inside, K4Connect CEO and co-founder Scott Moody told SHN. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based tech firm serves over 29,000 senior living residents across the country on its K4Community platform.

K4Connect began planning for Covid-19 well ahead of its initial disruption, and began sending out “Covid 911” bulletins to communities it serves. The firm developed a hotline for communities to keep residents and families updated on their response strategy, which can be accessed via phone or Alexa-enabled devices for residents. It is also providing virtual support for on- and off-premise staff.

Moody believes that there has been bad press regarding not having good communication with the outside world. For senior care, there needs to be an immediate response to address an issue or else a community will pay for it down the road.

“It’s not just about marketing, but marketing the community that you have,” Moody said.

The ability of tech to help with communications is critically important when residents and families may lack such normal touch points such as visits from family and friends if they are curtailed, CEO Scott Moody said.

 

By: Allan Maurer

March 13, 2020

RALEIGH — K4Connect, which creates technology centered around the Internet of Things to help older adults and individuals with disabilities, started focusing on ways to help senior communities deal with the coronavirus threat several weeks ago,

“We’re exceedingly focused on it and started two weeks ago, not just the last few days, said CEO and founder F. Scott Moody in an interview with WRAL TechWire.

“We are super-actively engaged. Seven days a week the last few weeks. Two things are important: making sure the resident’s family knows what’s going on with the resident and that the staff and family can communicate. Communication is extremely important at a time like this. An important element is for the family to make sure everything is ok with the resident.”

The ability of tech to help with communications is critically important when residents and families may lack such normal touch points such as visits from family and friends if they are curtailed, Moody said.

He acknowledges that tech augments the abilities of caregivers. “Tech doesn’t do it by itself. It doesn’t replace the human touch,” Moody said. “The caregiver is serving the same person we are.” Moody added that senior community caregivers “are an unbelievably caring group of people. They do a very difficult job for very little pay. They don’t get to work from home. They’re the front line. We’re here to help them.”

In general, Moody said, senior communities are pretty well prepared to deal with coronavirus because its the flu season, which is also significant to older adults. So senior communities prepare for that.

Technology can help by using K4Connect protocols and actions in place for a few weeks now to replace manual processes that are otherwise labor intensive. “It allows residents to do more on their own without requiring staff help,” Moody said.

For instance, the company works with Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker. “Voice technologies make it easier for a resident to know what’s going on,” said Moody. K4Connect provides Alexa units already programmed for use, so a resident only needs to plug it in. “We’re able to integrate Alexa into all departments (of a senior community). It makes it easier for the resident and staff to communicate.”

K4Connect tech also provides TV search functions, the ability for families to call and get resident updates without going through the front desk, smart signage in hallways, and a weekly Covid19 bulletin.

“I think what’s happening now shows the importance of technology in being able to manage a crisis like this,” Moody said.

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Read the article on WRAL TechWire, here

 

K4Connect aims to create a smart OS for senior living communities with a single interface for all technologies.

By: Dany Sullivan

March 10, 2020

Technology adoption among older adults has been consistently increasing over the years. In 2000, just 14% of those aged 65 and older used the internet, compared with 73% today, and more than half of them are smartphone owners. [1] But despite the high adoption levels, use of technology by the elderly is still hampered by usability and design issues.

A recent University of California San Diego study looked at technology use by older adults and found that “a significant source of frustration in their interactions with digital products lay in the inadequacies in software and hardware interfaces that permit access to different functionalities.” [2]

Longevity Technology: The ‘lack of use’ challenge has implications on Longevity, and in particular healthspan, as our quality of life is increasingly associated with technology, from health and wellness apps to smart home and assistive technologies. 

One company seeking to resolve this challenge is North Carolina start-up K4Connect. With its K4Community solution, the company has developed a single “operating system” for senior living communities that brings together a wide range of smart products for residents, staff and operators in a single, simple interface.

K4Connect’s co-founder and CEO is F. Scott Moody, a technology veteran and former CEO of fingerprint sensor firm AuthenTec, which was acquired by Apple in 2012 and provided the foundation of its Touch ID feature.

“After that I decided to retire, I can honestly say I was pretty burnt out,” says Moody.

But retirement didn’t last long. On a trip to Rwanda, Moody met an entrepreneur who helped battered women become bakers, and was inspired to start working again on something that could make a difference in people’s lives. Shortly afterwards, he got together with Jonathan Gould, the technology brains behind K4Connect and they came up with the idea for a single “multi-modal” operating system for an environment – something they called FusionOS.

“When you think of an operating system, you think of a physical device, your phone or your PC, but what we were looking at was, how does that become an operating system for an entire physical entity, whether it’s a home, whether it’s a hotel, whether it’s a school?” says Moody. “What multi-modal means is the idea of being able to integrate devices, whether they’re home or health applications, services or standalone systems, all into one system.”

 

 

“At the end he asked me, what does K4Connect do?” recalls Moody. “And I explained how all of these things could work in a very responsive way in your home and just make things easier, more convenient, and so on. And he said, ‘I have MS and that would be a great product for me.’”

That conversation became the catalyst for pivoting the company to focus on older adults and people living with a disability – and K4Community was born.

… the average age of the 30,000 people using K4Community today is over 83 … 85% of those people are now using the system on a daily basis.

Launched in 2017, K4Community focuses on six key pillars to enable smart senior living communities. Three of which are specifically focused on the residents: home, wellness and engagement. Moody describes the end-user experience as “the mission” of his company, pointing out that the average age of the 30,000 people using K4Community today is over 83, and that 85% of those people are now using the system on a daily basis.

“Our mission is to make their lives better, right? We do that,” he says. “And we do it for a demographic that is generally very, very underserved by technology. We provide utility in their lives, whether it’s home automation, whether it’s communication, whether it’s engagement.”

The other three pillars are more relevant to the operators: productivity, building and insight. Moody points out that senior living communities don’t typically have large IT departments, which also holds back widespread adoption of technology in the sector.

 

“They love all the different technologies, and they know that they can solve problems for them, but they don’t have the bandwidth,” he says. “We bring together all these different things into one. We integrate anything really, even at a device level. We don’t make any devices – it doesn’t make any difference what the device is or who made it, it doesn’t even make any difference what the protocol is, because we can integrate with it.”

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Click here to head to Longevity Technology to read the story!

Age-tech today promises to connect seniors with their families, increase their mental stimulation, deter isolation and keep them safe and healthy.

 

By: Mandy Behbehani 

February 29, 2020

Welcome to technology’s new wave: age-tech — the preferred term for products and experiences aimed at America’s “gray tsunami.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are an estimated 73 million Baby Boomers. And the Census’ 2017 National Population Projections showed that by 2034, seniors 65 years and older will outnumber children under 18.

The tech world is taking note, racing to serve this aging demographic — a group that, until now, has essentially been ignored by the industry. Whether it’s developing products that allow seniors to age in place or live in retirement homes, assisted-living facilities or memory-care centers, this is tech’s next frontier. Age-tech today promises to connect seniors with their families, increase their mental stimulation, deter isolation and keep them safe and healthy.

“With the increased penetration of smart devices into people’s homes, (people) are wanting to see these things in senior living communities,” says Davis Park, executive director of the Center for Innovation and Wellbeing at Front Porch, a Southern California nonprofit that owns Sunny View and nine other senior communities in California. “When they’re looking to establish themselves in a home, they expect the available technology to help support their needs.”

Due in part to its location, Sunny View is heavily invested in tech, using it for everything from live streaming Sunday services from a nearby church to Wii bowling tournaments and programs like Rendever’s virtual reality. And they’re paying for it: The community paid roughly $150,000 to $175,000 for all their tech systems, as well as ongoing rental fees of about $10,000 a month.

“We have post-fall huddles discussing what happened and how it happened and (we think), this person has fallen twice on the corner of the bed, so let’s change the direction and orientation of the bed,” says Therese ten Brinke, director of strategic initiatives at Eskaton, which operates three care centers and a dozen residential facilities in California, including the Trousdale. “And then we see those residents are no longer falling.”

Eskaton partnered with startup K4Connect to integrate smart sensors into apartments using devices such as lights and thermostats. The company rolled out social tablets with the K4Connect app that residents could also use to check the menu, access community announcements and connect with family members, but they didn’t do so well, says ten Brinke. “There was a steep learning curve, and sometimes there were some barriers for someone living with forgetfulness and lack of dexterity.”

When one resident with Parkinson’s disease said he needed to control the sensors with his voice, K4Connect integrated Alexa through its app and now residents can speak their commands.

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Read the full piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, here!

Coming off a strong year of growth in 2019, a Triangle technology solutions company says it expects to be doubling again in 2020.

 

By: Seth Gulledge

Raleigh-based K4Connect has been rapidly expanding for a number of years. Since making its debut in 2015 with $2 million in seed funding, the company has raised more than $27 million.

Its scaling efforts began in large in late 2018, following a $12 million Series B round that positioned it to expand access to its K4 Community platform – which integrates the latest smart home and health technologies into a user interface designed for senior living residents and staff.

At the time of its Series B, the company reported about 13,000 users of its platform.

According to CEO Scott Moody – formerly credited for the TouchID technology bought out by Apple – the K4Connect now reports 29,000 users, well over doubling its business in just over a year.

But Moody says the company is far from being at capacity.

“Frankly, I expect to double again this year,” he says.

 

 

The company declined to disclose exact financial figures, but Moody says its user total “tracks very well” to the growth of the company and its revenue. K4Connect says it currently has 27 customers that use its technology to reach those 29,000 users, most of who are in senior living communities owned by the customers.

Moody says the average user of the company’s technology is an 83-year-old woman.

“This whole idea that older adults don’t like technology is malarkey,” he says. “The fact of the matter is if you design something that provides real utility to their lives, making their lives simpler, healthier and happier, they use it.”

However, Moody says the difficulty of designing something for older users is the primary advantage it has on the market, as well as its ability to sell a product to senior living communities that seldom purchase beyond guideline required technology.

Expanding the company will require the continued hard innovation involved with new technologies, and then getting that technology into the hands of a more evasive customer base.

“We’ve learned how to do three hard things,” Moody says. “We’ve learned how to do the tech, we learned how to serve our members and we learned how to serve our customers.”

Central to the value proposition is turning the popular conveniences of modern technology into utility for older customers. Moody says whereas things like automated lights and thermostats are desirable to most demographics, those features can drastically improve the lives of older adults.

According to internal company data, some 80 percent of its users interact with its platform daily.

“I always tell people, ‘anyone can tell a story, but it’s the tech that makes it real,'” Moody says.

Looking ahead, Moody says the company will likely go back out to market for another raise at the end of this year. In regards to competition, he says the company believes that most of the existing competition is technology that would integrate into its platform, not compete with it.

Moody compares the situation to Apple’s IOS platform encouraging app developers to increase the value of its product.

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Read it in the Triangle Business Journal, here