Sentrics provides data-driven solutions that deliver a complete view of residents in assisted living care facilities. As the pandemic evolved, Sentrics knew it would have to optimize its application to ensure the well-being of senior citizens who were isolated in assisted living facilities. To provide mobility impaired seniors with a voice-controlled, all-in-one digital platform, Sentrics turned to Onica, a Rackspace Technology company and an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, for AI and ML expertise. With an urgent, expedited timeline in mind, the two teams worked to quickly add voice-controlled features to Engage360, a TV platform that allows residents to communicate with family and friends, manage a personal activity calendar, request services and more.

“The impact of COVID-19 on seniors living in assisted facilities really opened our eyes to the dire need for residents to virtually engage with others in their communities,” said Cory Patterson, vice president of Technology at Sentrics. “The Rackspace Technology team was on it and met deadlines much more quickly than we expected. As a result, we launched with a more robust product than we initially imagined, allowing us to improve the quality of life for seniors during a very serious crisis.”

To enable voice controls, Rackspace Technology team leveraged Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text and the technology that powers Amazon Alexa. Using the artificial intelligence capabilities of Amazon Lex, Rackspace Technology created a chatbot device that connected to seniors’ televisions, giving them access to an enhanced range of services. The Rackspace Technology team developed, implemented, trained and tested the natural-language-processing-powered chatbot tool ahead of the urgent six-week timeline.

“Sentrics is providing a critical resource for keeping seniors in touch with their communities while they are isolated from the outside world,” says Jeff DeVerter, CTO of Rackspace Technology. “We look forward to seeing how Sentrics’ Engage360 application will continue to evolve and benefit the lives of seniors through the pandemic and beyond.”