Case Study Collection

resident stories to personaliZE the senior living experience

I co-founded a company called TSOLife, that is disrupting how the senior living industry conducts business for the betterment of the quality of life of senior living residents.

During my time at university in 2015, I joined a student-run social enterprise organization and crossed paths with my co-founder. At that time, my co-founder had already developed the initial version of the TSOLife online platform, which served as a website where individuals could preserve their life stories, ensuring a digital legacy for future generations. The vision was that one day, no grandchild would wonder who their grandparent was. My first experience with the company was when we interviewed WWII veterans in a local retirement community about their life stories. I loved hearing these individuals’ life stories, and I could see that they very much enjoyed the experience as well. I became passionate about understanding the senior population and their unique journeys. From my time talking to the veterans about their life stories, I saw how much it meant to them to have someone to sit down and listen. I also learned a lot about the senior living industry and the challenges these communities face, which include high levels of depression and loneliness, high staff turnover, and outdated processes.

As I learned more, the TSOLife platform evolved, and our opportunity to make an impact grew. This endeavor became about much more than just preserving life stories but about creating a holistic environment where an individual's history, interests, and preferences were the central piece of their living experience. A growing body of evidence suggests that engaging in meaningful activities can help mitigate the negative effects of depression.

We adapted the product. The same audio interviews that we were using to capture life stories, we started using to capture intake interviews when new residents move into a senior living community. The process was tech-enabled, capturing the audio interviews with a mobile app. Not only did we hear a resident's life story, but we learned about their hobbies, interests, and preferences, and collected quality of life scores. In just a 30-minute sit-down interview, we created a comfortable space for residents to express themselves. We were able to learn what residents wanted to do, create opportunities, and use these opportunities to drive improvements in their quality of life scores.

This platform is innovative because senior living staff just have not had the tools in the past to make a completely tailored and personalized living experience possible with how many other responsibilities they have in their day-to-day roles. Traditionally, resident data was captured on paper forms upon move-in, stored in binders, and rarely consulted. As we examined this process and analyzed our customer data, we learned that although every resident was supposed to have a completed form, less than 40% of the residents in a community had a form on file, and most of the forms were insufficiently filled out. This means that these communities were missing key data for a large percentage of their residents. By streamlining the collection of resident social data, we resolved a substantial industry challenge. Some customers were able to collect 500% more data with TSOLife than their previous process.

Fixing the data collection process was the lynchpin that opened the door for us to provide solutions to so many other problems. With resident social data now available in digital format, we could analyze, present, and utilize it to generate personalized engagement recommendations.

I take immense pride in the fact that we developed a tool that empowers senior living staff to create an environment where residents can thrive and live their best lives. For more information about our research and design process, please explore the case studies below.

BACKGROUND