Transforming the resident experience: LifeLoop AI-enhanced solutions

Paige Mantel: All right. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining our webinar today. I'm Paige Mantel, chief marketing officer of LifeLoop, and happy to be the host for today's webinar on transforming the resident experience with AI. Two weeks ago LifeLoop announced our new AI-enhanced portfolio, and I’m really excited to take this time today to walk through what we announced, what we launched, and also start to hear some best practices of how to use it. So thank you for joining us!

A few housekeeping items. You'll be able to ask questions throughout the webinar by using the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. We'll be answering questions at the end of the webinar and hope to get to all of them. If we don't get to yours, we'll certainly follow up by email. In addition, we'll be sending out the recording of this webinar so that you can rewatch it or share it with your colleagues.

And then the one request we have is that at the end of the survey, if you could please, complete the short, I think 2 to 3 questions, survey at the end. So now that the housekeeping is out of the way, I'm extremely excited to introduce my guests for today's webinar. We have Dylan Conley LifeLoop’s chief technology officer, and he'll be walking us through a demo of our new AI capabilities.

And then, very excited to have from New Perspective Senior Living, Kirsten DeAngelis, Executive Director, and Jaime Hofer, Life Engagement Manager, who have been early adopters of these AI capabilities, and they're going to be sharing their experience with you on how they've been using the new AI capabilities and what their experience has been. So with that, without further ado, I'd love to hand it off to Dylan to walk through our AI vision and demo.

Dylan Conley: Yes, thank you, Paige, and while I share my screen, I'll just introduce myself again. I'm Dylan Conley, the chief technology officer here at LifeLoop, and I have an exciting demo to share with you all today. But before we get to that I want to talk about the significance of AI in senior living. And let's see if I can get this. Can everybody see my screen?

Paige Mantel: Yes.

Dylan Conley: Excellent. So the significance of AI and senior living AI is the next wave of disruptive technology. Right? First, the birth of the Internet fundamentally changed, how businesses are run. Then cloud computing changed, how we technology companies provide our products. And now, AI is fundamentally changing business efficiency. And in each of these cases, the success of our business broadly depends on our ability to adapt and to take advantage of these new technologies. So, generally speaking, the tools and the processes that took us to where we are today will not take us into the future.

But AI is a connector, not a disruptor, at least as we view it, which is why we have woven AI and fabric of our platform, infused it into our existing products, delivering continuous value to all areas of your business. And in the coming weeks and months you will all have access to everything I'm about to show you here. In fact, some of these things are already available today to you through your subscription.

So let's take a look at AI-enhanced LifeLoop. And I start this demo with something that might look familiar. This is a resident biography, and here our activity director has interviewed a resident and typed up comprehensive notes on the new resident’s biography, right? Including her likes and her dislikes. And now this is a wonderful thing. It ensures that the engagement programming is tailored and personalized to each resident's needs. But there's a problem. The problem is it took our activity director almost an hour to type all this up. And further, a lot of the time, the rest of the life enrichment staff just does not have the time to go back and read these Bios. So if this activity director were to leave or to take a job elsewhere, all of that knowledge would be lost. But with AI-enhanced resident onboarding, not only do we cut the amount of time required to get this information by 90%, but all of that information is automatically entered into the LifeLoop system informing all of the downstream activity programming.

So here our staff member simply records or interview with the Resident, and within seconds our AI has generated the biography and captured numerous categories to include and to avoid in the engagement programming, and we can see here that we know from the interview that Doris likes gardening and used to be an English teacher. So she likes literature. But how do we put this information to use?

Well, let's walk through how an activity director creates a calendar using AI-enhanced calendar management. Now, in the past, an activity director would have to type out hundreds of activities through the month, each with a robust description and facilitator notes. Pretty time-consuming activity to prepare these activities. But with AI-enhanced calendar management they simply type a prompt, and we do all the heavy lifting, all the typing and creative work. Not only that, the AI accounts for each resident's needs, and in this case Doris's interest in gardening.

Now one more example of the power and AI-enhanced calendar management not too long ago. It was spooky season, so wanted to include some Halloween fun in the agenda. Don't like this 1st recommendation. We'll try again. We'll get some crafting, which is not quite what I was looking for now. I haven't made an activity that covers intellectual wellness yet, so I'm going to adjust my prompt and see what the AI comes up with. And here this is perfect, and you can see the AI tells you how this was recommended, why it was recommended. And then it's accounting for Doris's interest in literature.

Now, if we didn't have access to a repository of Trivia, our activity director would have to go through the effort of creating all the questions, all the potential answers. It's a really time-consuming endeavor. And we know quite a bit about that, because we create quite a bit of trivia here.

But because iN2L's content is built directly into the solution, that work is not required of the activity director. Here she benefits from over 25 years of expert curation of content that meets the needs of every resident across the care continuum. And today, we have almost 7,000 different content items and virtual activities spanning all the dimensions of wellness, whether it be state of the art virtual fitness, content, or fully licensed music prescriptions, we have content that has you covered every day all day.

Now, that said, 7,000 items is a lot of content, and what we've heard from some of our customers is that they feel they're just scratching the surface of the value that this provides. There are the few 100 activities that are favorites within the community that they use over and over, and provides very rich, varied experience for the residents. But they know there's so much more, they just don't know where to start.

But with AI-enhanced calendar management, our AI reaches deep into our content, set to attach the best fit content for this particular activity. And in the case of our Halloween trivia, we've attached a Halloween trivia activity which will actually open up. So you can see the end result. And here this makes it so that anybody within the community, any volunteer who doesn't necessarily have an understanding of the content set, can merely go to the calendar and launch the activity for the day and time, and all the rest is taken care of for them.

So there you have it, a very quick demo of AI-enhanced LifeLoop from resident onboarding to content supported programming, our AI enhancements help your staff spend less time on the more administrative tasks, so they can spend more time with your residents.

Paige Mantel: Love that. Thank you, Dylan, for walking through the details and the demo of our AI-enhanced capabilities. It's very exciting. And love to hear now from New Perspective Senior Living on their experience again, they're an early adopter customer, a great partner of ours in giving feedback and helping us continue to deliver products that really make an impact in senior living communities. So let's start with some questions about your experience so far.

So, Jaime, what were some of the challenges that you previously faced around generating activities and calendars before getting your hands on this new capability?

Jaime Hofer: Prior to grabbing the AI technology you guys are giving us, the biggest thing was probably time management. I was very frantic and trying to find a time to like, actually sit down during the day and just plan things out. Along with the whole concept of a repetition of programs.

I was finding myself like repeating a lot of programs. I eventually had certain residents coming up to me be like, hey, we love that you're providing stuff for us, but do we really have to participate in this again? So, given the AI enhancement generator, I've really been able to provide new and interesting activities that we've even had. People who usually, you know, don't necessarily have an interest be like, what exactly is this? So just trying to dip their toe into the water, be like well, if you want to know, come, find out.

Paige Mantel: That's awesome. That's great. I love the fact that it's bringing you innovation in an easier way, right? Because you're spending way too much time behind a computer. And you want to be spending that time out with the residents.

Jaime Hofer: Right.

Paige Mantel: Awesome. Alright, Kirsten, how quickly were you able to start using the AI feature with? Did it require a lot of training.

Kirsten DeAngelis: No, it's such a no-brainer. We started using it the same day that we got access to it. It's really, it's not any different than the way that you would program anything else into your LifeLoop calendar. It's just a click of a button. We started experimenting with it right away, and we had a lot of success immediately.

Paige Mantel: That's great. And so, Jaime, what were your initial reactions to the new capabilities?

Jaime Hofer: We were actually like super surprised at how easy it was to use. I definitely thought I was gonna have to go in and edit things, but it was super easy. It generated spot-on with things that I wanted. Such as you know, a gardening activity with an indoor backup plan. It gave me that outside capability that I wanted. But just in case, you know, the weather didn't cooperate with us, it also gave us a backup plan to use inside to still be able to give those residents, you know, that garden club activity, that they really wanted.

Paige Mantel: That's amazing, because a lot of activities where you are, are weather-dependent, right? You want your residents spending time outside. But when that, when weather does not, is not on your side, to be able to just have a backup, that's amazing. That's great. So, Jaime, how long have you been using this feature, and how do you feel about it now, now that you've had a lot more experience with it?

Jaime Hofer: Honestly, since we've gotten it, it's only been 3 months, but it really feels like we've just had it from the get-go for forever. Chris and I were sitting down the other day, and we were talking. I'm like, wait, really? We found that it helps us get through programming so much faster and bringing new fresh ideas for everybody.

Paige Mantel: That's amazing. So, Kirsten, let's talk about person-centered care, because that is so important. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on how you deliver it, and how AI capabilities help you deliver that.

Kirsten DeAngelis: I think something that we all really strive for in this industry is to provide that person-centered care and those person-centered activities for our residents, but that can sometimes be a little bit challenging to do. You know, if you are working in a large community, remembering what all of your residents’ likes and dislikes are, and what their hobbies were before they came to and are at your community, can be a challenge. It can be really hard to make sure that you're offering something for everybody.

So one thing that Jaime and I were sure to do is utilize the likes and dislikes feature in LifeLoop. Our community, as I'm sure many other communities do, surveys our residents with their life history before they move in with us, and so we were sure to take all of that information and plug it into LifeLoop, so that we had all of our residents’ likes, and dislikes, and then what we found to be so helpful with AI was, it's really pulling that data for us. So now that that information is in LifeLoop, when we go to generate a program or activity, the AI generator is taking that into account for us. It's taking into account all of the data that we have on what our residents are liking and not liking to do.

It really helps us refresh our calendar on a monthly basis, right? As we get new move-ins or new move outs, all of that data is accounted for, and I think it also, you know, it makes Jaime and I feel very confident that when we say that we have person-centered care that we really, truly do have person-centered care. We're very much able to tailor our programs to what our residents are interested in.

Paige Mantel: I think that's great; I think you know, being able to use likes and dislikes to generate calendars that will drive engagement, right? It'll drive them to be involved and engaged because they're seeing activities that reflect, you know, their wishes and their passions and their interests. So great example of that. So, Jaime, back to you. On average, as you're the person responsible for building the activity calendars, which I know can be such a time-consuming task—how long did it take you to do that prior to this AI capability?

Jaime Hofer: Prior to the AI capability, it practically took me all month to sit down and actually think and try to bring the new ideas to the calendars. Which was very time-consuming, because, as previously mentioned, I'd much rather be out in the field with my residents, and enjoying and laughing with them, instead of being here behind the desk, trying to figure things out.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, and I bet the residents would rather have you out there enjoying life and laughing with them and engaging with them too.

Jaime Hofer: Like, right?

Paige Mantel: Exactly. So, Kirsten, now that you have the AI enhancement, how long is it taking the team to build calendars now?

Kirsten DeAngelis: Jaime's so fast at building her calendars now, I think I'm asking her to slow down! We went from, you know, life engagement is such a busy role to have in your community. And so I think often we're in this position of ,‘Oh, my gosh! It's already the last week of the month.’ You know, as we try to plan ahead, it's easily saved her one day a week of planning time. Just for an example now, in our director stand-up this morning, Jaime is almost done with her January calendar, you know?

Paige Mantel: Middle of November.

Kirsten DeAngelis: Yes, yes.

Paige Mantel: Wow!

Kirsten DeAngelis: Light years ahead. If anything, I'm asking Jaime to, you know, save a couple of spots in case we can like squeeze in something last minute that would be really exciting and interesting to our residents. But we're getting such great feedback from the activities that AI is generating, that we really are able to move so quickly from one month to the next. It's been great.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, tell me more about the resident feedback, Kirsten, like, what? What are you hearing from the residents.

Kirsten DeAngelis: They love it. You know, we're finding, we're seeing residents come out for things that they didn't normally come out for. We're getting engagement from our residents who maybe previously weren't that engaged, you know, and this is so great, especially when it comes to your new move-ins, right? Where it's so important for us to get our new residents connected into the community, and sometimes it's really hard to do that and to make them feel welcomed in that way.

Jaime and I had a really great success story this week with a couple that's moved in with us. His wife is very social, him not so much, and Jaime used an AI-generated program. He likes golf, and so it suggested a Putt for Points golf program, and he was out and about. He was enjoying himself. He was making new friends, and honestly, I saw a lot of residents that I don't see on the regular, so just having that creativity and that support with AI to come up with those ideas based on our residents’ likes, and dislikes, we've had such new turnout into our activities which is really wonderful.

Paige Mantel: Great example. I love the golf idea, and look, life engagement managers like Jaime are some of the most creative people in the world. But still, you know, you've got to have that time to be able to be creative. So having this as a support tool and an assist for you makes a big difference. That's great. So, Jaime, I know in Dylan's demo he talked about how, when you generate an activity, it also gives all the facilitator notes. So tell me how that's helping you.

Jaime Hofer: So facilitator notes are actually game changers for my job. So for my department, we currently have one person. But facilitator notes have helped so much to get other community staff members engaged with them. It literally just tells them, ‘Hey, you go here, click this, bring this up, and you're all set,’ whereas if I didn't have those to describe them, they'd be a little shyer and more standoffish in terms of, ‘well, I'm not really sure how to engage or interact with them, so what can I do?’ But these facilitator notes have honestly really helped a lot. There's more engagement all over our community. While we have one program going on, we've had other staff members using the AI generator and everything else for facilitator notes to bring out other activities, which has brought out more engagement as well.

Paige Mantel: Wow, so you can have more activities going on at the same time, you have more staff being able to run activities because the facilitator notes give them all the information they need to run it. That's amazing.

Jaime Hofer: And first, and then for some of our more engaging residents, they've even started taking the initiative themselves to create resident-led activities with a simpler facilitator note as well. So they usually ask me, they're like, ‘hey, I really want to start like a card club, like, what can I do?’ So I usually tell them, ‘Here are the materials, here's the basic idea of it, let's go. Let's get this going. Let's have fun.’

Paige Mantel: That's awesome. Resident-led activities with facilitator notes. That's awesome. These are great ideas. Cool. So, Kirsten, how are you seeing the AI enhancement help you and Jaime? Your community, your residents overall.

Kirsten DeAngelis: It's such a game changer. I literally don't know what we did without it before, and it wasn't even that long ago that we were doing it without it. But we've just seen such fresh new activities coming into play. You know, we're seeing that engagement from residents that we don't normally see engagement from. Even like Jaime mentioned, that willingness for resident-led activities is hard. Sometimes it's hard to have a resident who feels confident to do that amongst their peers. Facilitator notes have really helped us with that definitely, I think just an overall increase in participation from the rest of our team here in the community. Our team's always been great at chipping in, but you know, engagement and activities is not always everyone's comfort zone or strong suit. And so again, I think those facilitator notes have really made our team feel more confident about helping out and chiming in. Jaime doesn't have to spend as much time delegating. So we really are able to offer more things at once.

The other thing that I've noticed, we also use the iN2L content, and I've found that we're able to use the iN2L content more frequently. You know, I think sometimes iN2L is so wonderful, but you have to dive in to really decide what's gonna work well for your residents and what to use. And so this has helped us in that area also.

Paige Mantel: That is great. Yeah, the iN2L content is 7,000 pieces, as Dylan mentioned. So being able to, you know, easily access the ones that are most meaningful and connected with that activity, just really helps you reach into that library more easily.

Kirsten DeAngelis: Yes, yeah. 100. And then I think the other thing that we love the most is it helps us with a backup plan. You know we mentioned this already, but we're in the Midwest. The weather is especially this time of year. We want our residents to be outside when it's bright and sunny. We want them to soak up that sunshine. And so but best laid plans, right? It doesn't always work out that way. And I think Jaime's really wonderful at adapting to change. But this has just added that extra layer of being able to do that as a team. We meet every morning to talk about what everyone's plan is for the day, and there've been mornings before where I would be like, “I don't know, Jaime. It looks like it's gonna rain today,” you know. We've been able to use the AI generator to help us prompt a backup plan, so she doesn't have to pivot in the moment anymore. She knows that she already has that plan in place for the day or the weeks ahead.

Paige Mantel: That is amazing. So, Jaime, curious! Not to put you on the spot, but what's the prompt you put in to get a backup plan set up? If next week you were going to have an outdoor activity, what's the prompt that you put in for the backup plan?

Jaime Hofer: Usually I'll put in something like, for example, we actually did this other day because it was raining cats and dogs outside. So we were supposed to have walking club, but because it was raining so hard, I typed in real quick, “walking club activity with a physical backup plan for indoors,” because our residents, you know, they don't want to just walk the hallways and everything. So the AI generator actually came up for me relay races in a certain regard, with resident safety kept in mind. So what we did is we paired up in groups, and we kind of raced, quote unquote “raced” down the hallway with each other to see which group of residents could reach one end of the hallway first compared to the other. Another example is, we've done scavenger hunts during rainy days. They obviously, we don't want to go outside and get wet and slip and fall, so I tell them like, give me a quick 2 seconds. We hide things around, and the generator gives me scavenger hunt ideas. So residents have actually really enjoyed that lately. They're like, so what are the next things we're finding today?

Paige Mantel: That is, that's awesome. Thanks for going through those examples. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Jaime Hofer: Very welcome.

Paige Mantel: All right. I want to make sure people that are in our audience get to ask some questions, and I see some coming through. So let me let me start with a few questions here. So, Dylan, you know, definitely, AI, you know we're hearing a lot, we see things about AI in the news. You know, people I talk to when I'm at conferences, there's some fear, uncertainty, concerns about risks with AI. Can you help elaborate, you know, what are the risks of AI, and you know, what have we done at LifeLoop to help mitigate any risks?

Dylan Conley: Yeah, that's a great question, Paige. You know, the team here has spent a tremendous amount of time testing to ensure that our models have removed bias, is ethical, and avoids risky and inappropriate activities. But that said, as with all use cases involving computer generation, it's important to review or proofread the generated activity. So all of that is to say, any risk here can be mitigated by reviewing the activities before saving them.

Paige Mantel: Excellent, excellent, thanks for mitigating risks and helping people feel comfortable with using these capabilities. I know there's another question people are asking is, “How do our customers get access to start using the AI-enhanced calendar management?”

Dylan Conley: Yes, I've seen that question come up a few times, and I have some good news for everyone. The AI-enhanced calendar management feature we just showed is available to everyone with access to the LifeLoop calendar. Today it is built into the calendar that we all know and love, and it is in everybody's LifeLoop environment. So if you if you need help finding it or using it, feel free to reach out to the contacts that we're gonna provide at the end of this webinar.

Paige Mantel: Yeah, good point down. And one of the questions in the exit survey is, if you are interested in hearing more about that or making sure you can use it as soon as possible. There will be one question on kind of a yes or no that you can put in the survey, and we'll have your LifeLoop rep reach out to you and make sure you're all set. Awesome. Alright and then another question, “If I don't have calendar management with LifeLoop today, how can I get it?” So again, let us know in the exit survey, and we'll have your LifeLoop rep reach out and talk about how to get access to that.

Alright, Kirsten and Jaime, what are some of the fun new activities that you've added to your calendar?

Kirsten DeAngelis: Jaime did this one the other day, but we did a virtual bike ride. We have a fitness center that we find is underutilized, to say the least. And so we had to roll a TV in there; we don't have a TV in our fitness center. But if you did, you could use it that way, too. But that's the best participation that we've seen in a fitness class in our fitness center in a really long time. So that was one recently that Jaime did that I really loved.

Paige Mantel: That's good.

Jaime Hofer: So one of the other things that we've actually had some great participation in also is horseshoes. So yes, horseshoes are a physical fitness activity. But we've utilized the game of horseshoes as more of a social thing, and it's actually brought out a really competitive side to our residents. So they're always like smack talking each other, like, “Oh, well, I was closer. No, I was closer, like, how many points does that give me, Jaime?” So it's really helped bring out the social side of our residents, too.

Paige Mantel: Love that, wonderful! Alright, another question. This one's for you, Dylan. Do we have access to the AI-enhanced resident onboarding feature that you demoed; do we have that now? And if so, if not, when can we get it?

Dylan Conley: Yes, so we do not yet have the resident onboarding feature live in production for everybody. Once it is available, it will be available to everybody. We are just weeks away from launching that. However, if you would like early access, we will be running a pilot program with our most innovative customers. We would love to work with each of you. And so if you're interested, please feel free to reach out to me directly. I will put my email in the chat here and let me know you'd like to join the pilot. We'll get you started.

Paige Mantel: And I know Kirsten and Jaime will be on that list. Yes, awesome. Alright. We've got another question here. If directors add a community-specific unique program to the calendar, will the AI enhancement suggest residents to invite, based on the survey and likes and dislikes.

Dylan Conley: Let's see. I have to say no, let me make sure. I was kind of typing up my contact information while you read that, but I think I heard it. Will we be able to use AI to recommend the attendee list, or invites, based on...

Paige Mantel: Based on their likes.

Dylan Conley: Yes, so I can say to be transparent today, that is not part of the capabilities. However, that is a great idea and a feature on the roadmap. We have all the information, and we just have to take it that last step to make the recommendations as to attendees. So great idea, we're working on it.

Paige Mantel: Awesome, awesome, and I see that we are at our 30-minute mark. So let me just take a moment here to thank Kirsten and Jaime for sharing your experience, your expertise, and all of the fun that you're having with the new features. I'm so glad to hear the impact it's having for you, your community, and especially your residents. So thank you so much for sharing your ideas and experience with the group. And Dylan, as always, thank you for the great overview of those capabilities for all our customers on this.

And thank you to all of our attendees for joining us for these 30 minutes. As a reminder, we'll have that survey pop up as we close out this webinar. Please take the 30 seconds to answer those questions. We'd love to get your feedback. Thank you all very much.

Dylan Conley: Thank you, Paige.

Jaime Hofer: Thanks.

Kirsten DeAngelis: Thanks.

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