Embracing AI in Senior Care
- Lee StJames
- Aug 14
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 13
Author: Lee St James
Date Published: August 13, 2025
On August 7th, GlobalDWS hosted the first session of our Embracing AI 2025 webinar series: "Discover how AI is transforming senior care". Featuring real-life examples from one of our clients who worked with GlobalDWS over the past 12 months to develop a technology adoption roadmap for their long-term care (LTC) and retirement home residences, this webinar answers key questions facing senior care leaders about the benefits and feasibility of implementing AI-enabled technologies now.
The webinar ended with our Chief Digital Officer, Yahya Saad, sharing this ADKAR model of change management - a PROSCI methodology we use at GlobalDWS to support clients with successfully embracing new technologies and addressing the people-side of change.
Webinar Overview
The panel included guest speaker, Monica Klein-Nouri, Executive Director of Meighen Health Centre of the Salvation Army in Canada, along with Yahya Saad, GlobalDWS's Chief Digital Officer and Lee St James, VP Sales and Marketing. Optimizing resident care is always top of mind for Monica, along with supporting and enabling her staff.
The video recording (57 minutes in duration) is available here:
Market Trends
While there is rising awareness of and general interest in "artificial intelligence" across society, there are also fears and concerns that need to be taken into account. The biggest concern most people in North America express about 'Embracing AI' in their operations, is usually related to how people will be impacted - from the 'employee' perspective of potential job losses or from the 'customer' perspective of potential reduction in quality of personal engagement or less frequent interaction with people. However, the reality is quite different.
Lee presented this slide that refers to the general consensus about the likely impact of AI on jobs. People who know how to use AI will be empowered and will perform better than AI alone. So the most common impact will be the augmentation of jobs with AI.
After reviewing some of the financial benefits companies are seeing from the successful deployment of AI in their operations, Lee introduced Monica to share specific examples and key learnings from Meighen Health Centre's technology adoption journey. (8:00 mark in the video)
How AI is transforming Meighen Health Centre
Together with GlobalDWS, the team at Isabel and Arthur Meighen Manor (the LTC residence) have worked efficiently over the past 12 months to implement AI-enabled technology solutions like digital temperature sensors, social robots, cargo delivery robots, and more.
After working with GlobalDWS to develop a "Technology Adoption Roadmap", one of the first projects that they undertook was the planning and installation of connected, digital sensors to streamline and improve temperature and humidity monitoring in resident rooms and common areas. They also deployed different sensors for fridges, freezers and recording bath/shower water temperature. All the data is now logged automatically on a secure, centralized database.
Notifications are sent immediately to key personnel if a measurement is outside approved ranges, so they can proactively manage the situation rather than react to a complaint or find the issue by chance. When public health personnel arrive for an inspection, reports can be quickly printed on demand.
On the dashboard, floorplans can provide a visual summary of the status of the building, floor by floor and room by room.
Social Engagement Robots
(26:45) - In Monica's own words: "Social Robots was the funnest part for everybody... At the beginning, I had some reticence about them. I did not know how residents were going to receive them. After the first day when we brought them on the unit, I had no worries anymore."
She continued, "Family caregivers were surprised and impressed with how the robots interacted with the residents. ... they love the jokes, songs and trivia ... residents have a lot of fun with them."
In terms of impact of the social robots, the recreation staff can see increased social engagement, improving both short and long-term memory, abstract thinking, improving attention and focus, sparking discussions, reading with understanding, and more.
Staff are recording usage in Activity Pro and the average engagement recorded for robots' interaction is between 2.6 and 3 (on a scale of 0 to 3, where 3 is the best).
Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A
(30:00) - During the panel discussion and Q&A segment, Monica addressed a number of questions including how she budgeted for technology innovation and how she addressed questions from her staff and union representatives about the potential impact of robots on their jobs.
In terms of key lessons learned, she indicated that the foundation of her success was having a clear strategy for innovation and then developing the technology implementation roadmap.
Conclusion
After the Q&A, Yahya made some concluding remarks. He shared the 5-step process that GlobalDWS uses for our Technology Adoption Planning projects, along with an overview of the ADKAR model of change management that helps with achieving a higher level of adoption and staff confidence with technology and process changes.
He mentioned that AI note-taking and document processing are two of the most sought-after topics now with many of our clients leveraging our expertise as Microsoft Gold Partners in AI and Data Analytics.
You may wish to explore some of our previous webinar sessions or blog posts on similar topics:
https://www.globaldws.com/post/ready-to-work-smarter https://www.globaldws.com/post/expect-the-unexpected-in-seniors-care
Please contact us to book a free initial consultation when you are ready to take a structured approach to your technology adoption journey! NOTE: Edited November 13, 2025 - OLTCA published a 2-page article about our webinar in their Fall/Winter 2025 edition of "This is Long Term Care". You are welcome to download the article as a PDF by clicking this link:
The full magazine is available for viewing online by clicking this link:
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