New tools are helping seniors housing providers detect fall risks early, giving them an edge in prevention while preserving residents’ privacy and dignity. This technology is part of a new frontier in healthcare: tracking and identifying changes in behavior earlier and earlier while providing tailored alerts and wellness insights to improve outcomes.
“We are always looking for opportunities to reduce falls and maintain, or improve, the overall health and wellbeing of our residents,” says Mark Mountel, director of technology at Life Enriching Communities (LEC). The not-for-profit owner and operator of a half-dozen continuing care retirement communities throughout Ohio has been implementing ambient sensing technology. This allows LEC team members to immediately react to falls and observe resident movements and behaviors over time so interventions can be initiated to prevent further decline in the residents’ health and wellbeing.
“It ensures that our residents are able to stay in their least restrictive setting for as long as possible,” Mountel explains. “From a holistic wellness perspective, we are committed to helping residents live their best lives through the use of tools that help us understand their daily activities. Additionally, there are significant benefits in terms of continuity of care and financial savings when we can help someone remain in independent living or assisted living rather than experiencing a fall or other health decline and transitioning to skilled nursing.”
Ambient sensing products register position and movement in a monitored space. Some use light rays invisible to the eye while others, including the system at LEC’s properties, use radar. With a resident’s consent, sensors in their unit track when and how the individual moves inside their space. The three-dimensional positioning system operates around the clock and alerts staff immediately in the event of a fall.
New Technology Offers Improvement Over Other Systems, Gathers Data Trends
LEC
“Automatic fall detection provides a great advantage over the wearable alarm pendants,” says Paige Trotta, executive director of LEC’s Wesley Woods community in New Albany, Ohio.
“If they fall, they can press their pendant, and that alert goes to a cell phone with our clinical team so they can respond,” she says. “But some residents don’t carry their pendants, whether for personal reasons or because they’ve forgotten to put it on. The new technology we’ve been using has given us the opportunity to provide those alerts automatically, and it’s giving us the best fall detection that we’ve seen.”
In addition to fall detection, the software behind ambient sensors collects and congregates data and allows the observation of trends over time. LEC’s setup, developed by MatrixCare, allows LEC team members to review user-friendly dashboards that provide ongoing insights into each resident’s routines, helping them detect troubled sleep, changes in bathroom usage or other patterns that could indicate health problems or increased fall risk.
LEC has been rolling out the system as part of unit remodels and in new construction, Mountel says. They only activate ambient sensing technology in units with resident consent. Installation and establishing network connectivity is relatively simple, Mountel adds. After each installation or new tenant move-in, the system maps the space and spends about two weeks learning the resident’s routines to form a behavioral baseline. From that point, the technology reports activity as data trends, creating wellness scores for sleep, mobility, stability, bathroom use and sociability.
Ambient sensing technology is helping LEC’s teams make the best use of staff and resources by indicating which residents may be experiencing difficulties that could signal a health issue, Trotta says. For example, Trotta and her clinicians review dashboards each morning and discuss potential causes behind unusual wellness scores, following up with the residents when needed.
“The dashboard color system functions like a heat map. For instance, if we click on a resident and notice they’re marked orange for mobility, we can dive deeper to analyze when their mobility decreased and by how much,” Trotta says. “We may pick up on something we feel needs to be followed up on in person.”
Behavioral Insight Linked to Resident Health
Ambient sensing technology is a game changer for clinical teams, says Allison Rainey, head of nursing and clinical informatics at MatrixCare. Insight into a senior’s activity and behavior can be a vital aid in early identification of a range of conditions, from illness to mobility loss, social isolation or potentially treatable diagnoses, like depression.
“Ambient sensing is not just helpful from a fall-detection perspective, but also in preventing emergency room visits and hospitalization,” Rainey says. “If we can recognize changes in activity patterns or mobility and address them early, we can really affect the outcomes.”
MatrixCare
Ambient sensing technology has helped seniors housing providers detect and avert health crises for some residents, says Megan Anderson, MatrixCare’s head of ambient sensing solutions.
For example, a client’s independent living resident with normally regular sleeping habits had begun to show deteriorating sleep scores. Questioned by a staff nurse, the man said he frequently rose in the night to relieve back pain.
When ambient sensing began showing increased bathroom trips for the same resident, the nurse helped arrange an exam by the resident’s doctor, who discovered a urinary tract infection. Treatment quickly alleviated the resident’s discomfort — averting a more serious kidney infection — and the individual’s sleeping and bathroom scores returned to normal.
“I get goosebumps every time I talk about this technology helping like this,” Anderson says. “It’s the perfect story about what you want to see for wellness and health management.”
The same incident underscores another benefit of ambient sensing systems, which is closing the loop on intervention measures by showing their effect on a resident’s wellness scores.
“You could close that loop in a number of senses to see if an intervention is working,” Anderson says. “If you use a medication or deploy therapy, for example, is it making a difference in the resident’s behavior and comfort?”
Looking Ahead
As ambient sensing technologies expand the volume of data available to seniors housing staff and care teams, product developers are working to make that information more manageable. For example, MatrixCare is exploring ways to improve integration across systems, giving clinicians a full view of a resident’s clinical picture from health record data available as well as non-observed activity data from ambient sources, Rainey says.
Linking wellness score dashboards to a resident’s medical records could aid clinicians in deciding whether a behavior change calls for further inquiry. For example, a resident recently prescribed diuretics could have that medication information displayed next to alerts for changes in bathroom use.
“With so much data out there now for clinicians to try to filter through, this technology is going to help bring to the surface the critical data that clinicians need to make the right decisions at the right time,” she says. “That’s the end game: Providing the best experience for the clinician by empowering them to do the right thing by the resident for the best outcome. That’s everybody’s goal.”
— By Matt Hudgins. This sponsored content was written in conjunction with MatrixCare, a content partner of Seniors Housing Business.
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