✨Na Technology Forum

At LeadingAge, I met Vida Roozen, whose business is providing "Tech Concierge" services to senior living communities. She asserts that technology is so integral to residents' daily lives that support has become an essential amenity. Her company offers on-site and remote support for residents' personal tech.

Many providers have shied away from adding staff to support residents' IT needs, thinking that the demand will dwindle as the more tech-savvy generation of residents moves in. But the opposite may be the case. Newcomers have more advanced tech they use daily, and rapid advances are challenging to keep up with.

Here's the website: The Smarter Service

What do you think residents need?

Richmond Shreve

NaCCRA Board Member & VP

Forum Moderator

Richmond and other tech-oriented members,

At our CCRC (Wind Crest, an Erickson community) our 2,200 residents are assisted by our 20 resident volunteer Tech Helpers. The need for assistance has been growing because increasing numbers of newly-arriving residents are accustomed to using smartphones, tablets and computers, and they need continuing help with evolving features of the devices.

We organize two monthly 2-hour drop-in sessions per month — one for Apple devices and the other for Windows and Android devices. The Apple sessions, especially, attract 6 to 20 residents per month. We also post the names of some of our 20 helpers who are willing to go to apartments, e.g. for WiFi issues, printing problems, cable TV and streaming issues, desktop computer problems and so on.

Our volunteers are in addition to the three paid tech staff who charge $45 for the first half hour if there’s an issue the volunteers can’t solve.

Face-to-face assistance is essential. Many residents are needing orientation and basic learning advice and that can’t be provided effectively over the phone. For that reason, a solely on-the-phone tech support service wouldn’t meet the needs of most residents.

At LeadingAge in Denver a couple of years ago, I came across a vendor specializing in helping seniors with their electronic devices and corresponded with them for quite a while -- but they had not yet "gotten" to the east coast. (I'm in North Carolina.) When my emails to them started to go unanswered, I learned they evidently didn't recover from the Covid years and were no more. I then learned of TheSmarterService and started corresponding with Vida Roozen. I for sure made it a point to seek out TheSmerterService booth in the EXPO hall of this month's LeadingAge convention in Boston.

They want to expand and are moving west to east (headquartered in CA), hoping to be nationwide by the end of 2026. I haven't discussed the situation completely with them, but I would imagine that without personnel "on the ground," a client would probably get their help remotely. This would probably be via a special technology like Team Viewer. Personally, I would prefer personal, face to face help. I had asked TheSmarterService if they could help a resident with their TV's (either smart or ones with Roku or Firesticks) to obtain the free streaming apps that our bulk cable service (Spectrum, for us) now offers. This is an environment where some residents don't know if their TV is smart or not; or, in some cases of having a smart TV, if it's smart enough. How could that sort of TV help be done remotely? (I wouldn't know.)

What I do know is that some residents have mentioned to me that their offspring can access their computers remotely and they get their help that way... maybe even via Team Viewer. My question: what if that offspring's computer gets hacked? Would the hackers then obtain access to those computers the person had on their Team Viewer? My recommendation would be to stick to the professionals, rather than an amateur , like TheSmarterService.

In the meantime, we await not only TheSmarterService's expansion geographically, but we also hope our management sees the wisdom of contracting with a service like this. Right now they don't seem interested, while I think some residents are way too vulnerable to identity theft and possibly being stripped of assets.