How to personalize engagement with AI content recommendations

When considering residents’ well-being, it’s important to go beyond clinical care. While physical health has traditionally been a key focus in senior living, research shows that up to 80% of health outcomes are influenced by non-clinical factors like social connection, cognitive engagement, and emotional wellness.

These dimensions of well-being are deeply personal. Each resident enters a community with their own set of preferences and expectations for socializing, pursuing hobbies, and finding a sense of purpose.

This raises an important question for senior living leaders: how can we create engagement programming that meets individual needs while still scaling across a diverse resident population?

The answer lies in personalization—and increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI). AI-enhanced Content Recommendations, integrated with a full suite of AI solutions, allows senior living activities staff to create engagement experiences that feel not only personalized, but also more meaningful, dynamic, and accessible.

Here’s how AI can help scale engagement personalization at every step, from move-in day to every day engagement.

Step 1: Put the “person” back into personalization

Each resident enters a community with their own set of experiences, passions, and vision for what aging well means to them. Understanding each person’s unique background is the foundation to creating deeply personalized programming.

But capturing resident information has historically required significant staff resources. Staff may need to hand-write notes during resident intake interviews, or painstakingly transcribe an audio recording. This manual process is not only time consuming, it increases the likelihood for inaccurate information or missing information entirely. Especially as staff members leave the community or new staff join, having a centralized place to store resident information is also critical for consistent care and engagement.

AI can streamline the resident intake process, making it easier for staff to get to know residents. For example, an AI-enhanced resident onboarding solution can transcribe resident and family interviews and categorize relevant information into a comprehensive resident profile. With this information centrally stored, all staff members can better understand who each resident is and tailor their experience to help them feel seen as a unique individual.

Step 2: Turn resident insights into engaging, tailored experiences

A senior living community is like a pointillist painting, where each resident represents a single point that collectively makes up a cohesive picture. For engagement staff, the challenge lies in honoring each individual paint stroke while designing a calendar with community-wide appeal.

An AI-enhanced calendar management solution can help activity teams balance residents’ personal preferences while creating shared opportunities for connection and discovery. When you have complete resident profile information integrated into your activity planning system, AI can suggest activities that reflect your residents’ overlapping interests.

Say your community has residents who love gardening and others who enjoy painting. Rather than offering separate activities, the AI might recommend a “Watercolor Flower Painting in the Community Garden” session—combining both interests in a way that brings people together.

Aside from generating creative, personalized activity ideas, AI can also help activity teams adapt to unexpected changes. For instance, if it rains on the day you’ve planned your outdoor painting session, the activity generator can suggest an indoor variation that uses print-outs or internet-based images of flowers.

In this way, AI becomes a creative partner for your staff, helping them reduce time spent on planning, ensure continuity in programming, and maximize the time they get to spend with residents.

Step 3: Enrich activities with dynamic content

By capturing information on resident interests, and having a streamlined way to incorporate preferences into your activity planning solution, you can generate calendars full of activities that entice residents to sign up and attend. But once residents are there, how do you make sure that they feel engaged?

Incorporating dynamic, multisensory content—like music, videos, educational materials, and interactive games— into activities can help stimulate more engagement and participation. By giving staff access to a repository of clinically-backed engagement content, communities can help them create activities that are engaging and support residents across all dimensions of wellness. This can also help them save time researching and compiling the content themselves.

AI can take this a step further. With AI-enhanced content recommendations, staff can quickly surface relevant, evidence-based materials that match the goals of the activity and the preferences of participants.

Let’s return to the “Watercolor Flower Painting” example. If physical painting materials aren’t available, the AI might recommend a touchscreen painting app as an alternative. While some residents create digital art, others might explore images of bouquets or listen to calming classical music to stimulate creativity.

By helping staff find the right content at the right time, AI empowers them to create richer, more meaningful moments with residents.

Create meaningful engagement with AI

Senior living communities are always evolving. New residents bring new interests. Longtime residents develop new passions. Engagement programs must grow with them; supporting not just who residents have been, but who they are becoming.

By investing in AI tools that help staff plan, adapt, and personalize engagement, senior living leaders can foster a community life that supports residents’ continued growth, well-being, and sense of purpose.

Can AI tools help you reduce staff workload and personalize resident experiences? Book a demo with our team today to learn more about how LifeLoop can make a difference in your community.