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Enhancing Senior Living with Voice-Controlled Technology
Sentrics announced that residents of senior living communities can now use voice control to turn their TVs on and off , change channels, record movies, and open all Engage360SM applications. Leveraging the proven Lex technology, the solution is optimized for Sentrics solutions, requires no additional hardware or cost, and is activated with a simple button click, rather than a wake word, to provide a secure, comfortable option for residents to interact with family, friends, the community, and the healthcare ecosystem.
“We designed our voice control for the residents of senior living communities,” said Darin LeGrange, CEO of Sentrics. “We made it easy to use by leveraging the Lex technology and teaching it the words residents would use the most often to open and interact with our suite of solutions. Rather than have the solution always listening, which makes some residents uncomfortable, residents activate it with a button click on their remote. And because it uses the same hardware as our Engage360 and Entertain360 platforms, we make it available for no additional charge.”
Engage360 is the Sentrics whole-health engagement platform that transforms the resident TV into a social, health and wellness engine by giving residents of senior living communities fingertip access to family, friends, the community, and healthcare ecosystem through their own familiar TV.
Voice control makes interactions with technology easier and less scary
Residents know what they want to do, it’s the how-to with new technology that can be the challenge. For residents with poor dexterity, the ability to use voice commands to operate their TVs can be a game changer. The Sentrics voice solution includes the following functions:
- Turns the TV on and off
- Changes channels
- Records and plays movies through the integrated DVR
- Opens all Engage360 applications
- Activates with a single click on the Sentrics remote control
Nancy Bossert, a resident at Sonata West in Winter Garden FL., and an early user of the technology said “I’m so excited about the new voice technology! Navigating Engage360 will be much easier than fumbling with a remote; I just say what I want! I live by the KISS philosophy—just keep it simple—and that’s what this voice technology does!”
Sentrics solution leverages Amazon Lex
Working with Rackspace, Sentrics used Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, to power its voice recognition solution. Amazon Lex provides advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions.
“Lex powers sophisticated, natural language conversational bots like Alexa,” said Malcolm Graham, Chief Technology Officer of Sentrics. “Unlike Alexa, our Sentrics solution is optimized to work with our resident-specific solutions making our senior-optimized solutions even easier to use.”
Brook Ellis, Regional Director for Sonata West agrees and shared that “The best-selling point is that it is easy, easy, easy! Easy to install, you just plug it in; easy for residents to activate from a familiar device they already have; and easy commands that help residents navigate the Engage360 simply.”