By Jack Cumming
For some visionaries, who embrace a future with AI-enabled robots and other advances, it can seem like senior living is stagnating. Thomas Mann famously noted in his great novel The Magic Mountain, “A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.” We can note that, given our epoch as distinct from Thomas Mann’s, the same can be said of women as well.
Don’t Stay Stuck in the Past
If you think about this quote while processing your own thinking, it’s not hard to realize the basic truth of the observation. We take indoor plumbing for granted. It’s part of our epoch, and it’s a convenience that we share with most everyone now living. Yet, in an infamous axe murder, there was a rumor that Lizzie Borden killed her parents because her affluent father wouldn’t replace a cellar privy with modern plumbing. It’s a common fallacy to judge the past by the values of today. The epoch and views of contemporaries are very different from those of the past.
The simplest truism is that the present continuously transforms the future into the past. Thus, to matter, one must be an actor in that transformation. Not everyone has that wisdom. Many people are resistant to change and cling to the past even as a better future beckons.
Enter Artificial Intelligence
That brings us to the much-heralded advances of artificial intelligence and its embodiment, robotics. It can be tragic for a corporation to have a technology officer who resists the future. With the pace of innovation today, the successful C-suite needs both mastery of the practicalities of the internet and prescience about the vast potential of our AI-empowered future. This is particularly true for senior living. Given the vulnerability of the population served, accuracy, alertness, and responsiveness are crucial. Medication errors can be fatal, to cite just one example where machine-like accuracy is essential.
When we watch the rapid advance of Tesla’s Optimus robots, only those blinded by fear of personal obsolescence would fail to see the potential for the transformation of senior living. Given its Tesla origins, it’s not surprising that the early applications are in support of automobile assembly. Large “robots” already dominate there, and now humanoids are coming to further perfect the process.
It’s no stretch to imagine such robots helping people who need assistance, just as mobility scooters already are robotically helping people. The demands and repetitiveness of many lower-level senior living tasks lends itself naturally to AI robots. One wonders why something as straightforward as a two-person transfer isn’t already mechanized.
A True Story
Here’s a true story, fictionalized to make a point without casting aspersions. A normally healthy male goes from a chilled room into a hot shower. The steam and heat cause a sudden onset of syncope. His wife pulls the bathroom emergency cord, and after phoning to confirm an emergency, the on-duty CCRC staff arrive. The wife has returned from the phone to help her husband sit on the toilet top.
Sensing his faintness, the husband asks to be allowed to lie down on the bathroom floor so blood can flow to his head. The on-call staff object, thinking perhaps that they might lose him if he goes to floor. Finally, after much struggle, they get him to his bed where he is allowed to lie down, and immediately full function returns to him.
Many on-call staff may not be fully trained to deal with such a nocturnal incident. Some senior living communities employ EMTs for emergencies, but not all do. A fully trained response robot, though not yet available, could have the AI capability to know what to do and the strength to lift the patient if needed.
The Robots Are Coming
Anyone who is up-to-date with robotic advances thus can see the potential ahead for better, less costly senior living. Already AI is able to help pathologists improve their work. That is reducing the number of pathologists needed, though the profession is pushing back to try to keep their human jobs. That’s to be expected. The dislocation ahead may be comparable to the mechanization of farm labor not many decades ago. Over the span of just a few decades, the United States evolved from a predominantly rural society to an urban one.
As AI-empowered robots are able to take on more and more menial tasks, the progress and pushback of that earlier era is to be expected. Wise is the technology leader who embraces that emerging future and who brings the benefits of depth, capability, and competency to residents in senior living. Wiser still will be the business leader who redeploys displaced workers to give them the benefits that technological advance makes possible.
What of the Human Touch?
Yes, residents want the human touch. But even more than that, they want knowledgeable responsiveness in times of crisis when they are scared and only hope to survive. Senior Living Foresight’s AI Lab early next year in Las Vegas is a chance to get your mind around this rapidly emerging new technology.
Senior living requires a challenging mix of high empathy, acute attentiveness, and mundane tasks all delivered for an affordable price. That’s a mix that’s made to order to benefit from intelligent machines together with a new concept for human interactions. One of the biggest C-suite missions will be to manage rapid changes in workforce humanely and with positive outcomes for everyone.
For now, AI advising bots can counsel today’s workers to give them greater expertise, avoiding missteps like keeping upright a resident who is fainting. Still, that stage of advisement is likely to be transitory. Let’s be candid. Cautionary stagnation is not in the best interests of residents, employees, or corporate providers. Stagnation is not a winning strategy.
Editor’s note: At the Foresight AI Lab in Las Vegas, learn how to use AI to elevate your entire organization. You’ll walk away with skills and takeaways you can immediately put to use. Learn more here. It happens January 2025.
