Assisted living facility residents, frequently restricted by a lack of mobility, often have to pass on attending their relatives’ distant weddings or traveling the world they had planned to explore later in life. Rendever, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology startup, is endeavoring to change that.
Co-founded by Reed Hayes, Dennis Lally and Tom Neumann, Rendever is a startup that strives to bring virtual technology to older adults. The co-founders explained that they hope to not only give the elderly virtual experiences they might be incapable of having in reality, but also give them a better quality of life. For additional assisted living options visit memory care center In Tomball, TX.
“The inspiration came from personal experience, where I had several family members who were living in assisted living facilities and memory care units throughout my life,” Hayes said.
Keeping assisted living facility residents happy, engaged with life and connected to their families are among the greatest challenges faced by their caregivers and family members, Hayes explained.
With the rise of virtual reality, the co-founders said they saw an opportunity to ease the challenges of assisted living via emerging technology.
Creating Rendever, however, offered challenges of its own, Lally said.
“You’re taking one of the more advanced technologies out in the market today and making it accessible for a population that’s historically viewed as, you know, not early adopters of [any] sort of technology, really,” Lally said.
Confronted with a user group whose hands often lack the dexterity to operate technology with ease and who sometimes struggle to use complex software, Hayes and Lally said they sought to provide older adults with the experiences virtual reality can offer without the stress of navigating it for themselves.
“We built technology from group [synchronization] and tablet controls that allow someone else who is better at using the technology to guide their friends and loved ones through [these] pretty cool experiences, as well as to let them have the social conversations about where they’re traveling,” Hayes said.
For the upwards of 50 percent of assisted living facility residents who experience depression and isolation, these virtual journeys could serve as an effective form of reminiscence therapy, according to Rendever’s website.
“Most basically, [it’s] in the form of looking at old photos and talking about times and places from your past experiences,” Lally said.
He added that reminiscence therapy is a clinically validated technique that provides cognitive function and well-being.
Lauren LeBlanc, a senior in Boston University’s College of Communication, expressed the importance of this type of therapy.
“My one grandmother is in her 90s and is in an assisted living facility,” she said. “Thankfully, she’s still pretty mobile and has all her faculties, but … she doesn’t get to travel, so I think having those experiences would be really valuable for her.”
With regards to Rendever’s potential to combat isolation by connecting assisted living facility residents to their distant relatives, James Cummings, co-director of BU’s Communication Research Center and professor of emerging media studies, expressed concern.
“Let’s say the great grandchild has their fifth birthday party,” Cummings said. “At the party, someone could capture with a 360 camera for an hour or so … and then the individual can experience that through [virtual reality] later on … There’s kind of this window element to it. You can’t leap through. You can’t interact.”
Nevertheless, facilities utilizing Rendever have experienced a “40 percent increase in happiness,” according to Rendever’s website.
On Feb. 23, Rendever was selected as the winner of MIT’s Sloan Healthcare Innovations Prize and awarded $25,000.
“The funding is going to help us continue to move the business forward and really serve as a bridge as we look to launch our next fundraising round,” Lally said.
Rendever’s future, Lally said, will be focused on creating additional virtual reality content for older adults as well as more therapeutic interventions geared toward preventing and treating dementia, depression and isolation.
Reflecting on Rendever’s impact on assisted living facility residents, Hayes shared one of his first experiences using virtual reality with an older adult.
“It was a man who had dementia and, effectively, he was sitting in a wheelchair, not moving, not really talking, not engaging in the world,” he said. “And he was really just playing a game of waiting. He couldn’t eat by himself. He wouldn’t talk to anybody, and it was really, you know, a depressing situation.”
Using Rendever, Hayes and Lally took this man to a virtual setting that mimicked Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”
“Immediately, he started dancing and moving his hands to feel the wall and then he started describing what he was seeing and he wouldn’t stop for about 30 minutes,” Hayes said.
His caregivers, Hayes said, were stunned to see such an animated response from him.
“Sometimes,” Hayes said, “it’s easier to go to Mars than it is to spur on this type of emotion from a dementia patient.”
