Technology

K4Connect and Kisco Team Up to Bring Amazon Alexa to Senior Living Communities

October 31, 2018

RALEIGH, NC–K4Connect, a mission-centered technology company that creates technology solutions that serve and empower older adults and individuals living with disabilities, announced an expanded partnership with Kisco Senior Living to bring end-to-end voice enabled communities online starting this quarter. Working with Amazon to integrate Alexa with K4Connect’s flagship product, K4Community, will provide voice first smart home experiences for residents.

“For Kisco, the benefits of voice were immediately recognizable. For more than 20 years we have been committed to exemplary service delivered with integrity, dignity and compassion and we feel innovative technology has a core role to play in our ability to continue to raise the bar,” said Andy Kohlberg, CEO of Kisco Senior Living. “We could not be more excited to team with K4Connect and Amazon, to bring fully voice enabled communities to market. We see voice as a transformational technology and we are excited to deliver it to more and more of our amazing residents.”

The new voice enhancements build on existing K4Community capabilities to provide senior living residents, operators and staff members with new ways to engage and manage all aspects of home and community life. The integration of Alexa as part of K4Community will provide an enterprise solution for senior living, making any community a smart community.

The experience will offer residents the ability to use their voice to ask Alexa to control apartment lighting, access wellness data via Garmin devices, ask what’s for lunch, chat with the front desk or even sign up for events or outings, giving them more access and control. For Kisco Associates, the K4Community enterprise platform enables central administration, fleet management, enterprise analytics, end-to-end integration and unified resident-centered support.

“Clearly voice technologies are becoming a bigger part of our daily lives, in fact many of us ask Alexa daily about the weather or the latest sports scores, play music or complete a task like setting a timer. However, we’ve seen that voice technology can provide real utility to older adults, especially those who might face physical challenges,” said F. Scott Moody, Chief Member Advocate, Co-founder and CEO of K4Connect. “With Alexa, Amazon has provided us with the ability to create amazing experiences for our members and community staff. Our work with Amazon, as well as our own Fusion platform/OS technology—on which all our products are built—enabled us to quickly and seamlessly integrate Alexa into the K4Community enterprise solution.”

K4Connect and Kisco have partnered on this groundbreaking solution at The Cardinal at North Hills, Kisco’s flagship community in Raleigh. Building on the successes and learnings of these deployments, Kisco will be implementing K4Community’s voice solution at The Cardinal in the coming months, with plans to roll out nationwide starting in 2019.

With this enhancement, K4Community now allows for:

  • Complete Voice Integration with Smart Home, Smart Wellness and Social Technologies: Through this next generation interface, senior living community residents can now manage their smart home and wellness devices, as well as communication and community content through simple voice commands.
  • Simplified User Interactions: With Alexa, K4Community has simplified the user interaction experience and helped increase accessibility to smart home controls for connected lights, thermostats and more.
  • Advanced Community Analytics: Data is at the core of the K4Community enterprise experience so as to understand adoption, usage and value creation. K4Community’s robust analytics engine allows communities to measure and manage in order to provide the best in hospitality and care.

 

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