This week on the AgeTech Collaborative™ blog, we are pleased to welcome a guest post by Martina Viduka, CEO and co-founder of Advosense, an ATC startup participant focusing on intelligent solutions for older adult care, starting with an incontinence care solution with patented sensing technology. In this post, Viduka discusses her recent experiences participating a groundbreaking two-week Entrepreneur-in-Residence program with United Church Homes, a managed senior living and affordable housing provider and also an ATC participant. Let's jump in!
Advosense envisions a world where older adults feel seen, heard, safe and empowered. We are an early stage startup on a mission to transform older adult care by empowering clinicians to know when, where and how to best respond to their patient’s needs.
We are starting with incontinence, developing our first product: a sensor-based solution to support the management of incontinence care. Our disposable sensor is applied to any adult incontinence brief. When the patient becomes wet, a notification is sent to the caregiver so they’ll know the brief is ready to be changed. This simple, efficient solution empowers caregivers to manage incontinence more effectively by removing unnecessary steps in their current routines, which improves the quality of care and decreases complications associated with incontinence. Most importantly, it promotes dignity and grace in older adult care.
Unlocking the Power of Co-Creating
We are committed to building compassionate technology for caregivers. As a co-founder of Advosense and as a registered nurse, I understand the significance of co-creating alongside clinicians, who are our end users. Collaborating and designing with those clinicians to build solutions they actually need and want to use allows them to clearly see exactly how the solutions will support the care they provide. I know from firsthand experience that if they don’t clearly see those benefits, the solutions will just sit on the shelves. In fact, nurses can get really creative to ensure they don't have to use them. On the other hand, nurses also use their creativity in their everyday workflow, getting scrappy and hacking their own solutions to help them get their jobs done. Why not use this creativity and intuition to ensure that we build something that is actually helpful, will enhance patient care and will help people succeed?
At Advosense, this mindset has been vital to our development process. From our inception, we have worked alongside nursing staff and other key stakeholders to understand their current state and the pains of their daily workflow (we are a big fan of using Lean methodologies to do so). Once we have that understanding, we test smaller concepts before settling on a direction and moving forward, co-creating every step of the way in continuous, iterative testing cycles. This is one of the main reasons we joined the AgeTech Collaborative™: to connect with testbeds and key stakeholders to enable our co-creation approach.
As an early-stage tech startup, these opportunities for touch points with users and key stakeholders have been invaluable. After our first co-creation design sprint, 93% of clinicians chose the concept that emerged over the competitors, stating that they could see the direct benefit of using it, and that it wouldn’t disturb their workflow. In another session, the time it took to train new users on a solution was reduced from 15 minutes to just a few minutes. That’s a huge win.
Connecting with United Church Homes
Earlier this year, as we continued to develop our minimal viable product, it came time to go back to the users for more feedback and testing. We began looking for opportunities to connect with a testbed. Through the AgeTech Collaborative™, we connected with United Church Homes (UCH), a leading provider of healthcare and senior living services with a mission to transform aging by building a culture of community, wholeness and peace.
Initially, when discussing the opportunity to test our solution, Mike Hughes, senior executive vice president and chief transformation and innovation officer at United Church Homes, shared a new program they were launching to support the development of emerging technologies in older adult care: an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) program. This new approach would bridge the gap between the entrepreneur, residents and the staff, allowing for immersive, real-life experiences in care firsthand.
As a nurse innovator, I loved this idea because it demonstrated true collaborative innovation. We dove right into how such a partnership could work. Immediately, Mike found the perfect sites for the program: The Glenwood Community’s assisted living wing, The Pines, and The Harmar Place Community, a skilled nursing provider, both owned by UCH, located in Marietta, Ohio. Mike then brought the leadership team on board.
The aim was set: Representing Advosense, I would spend two weeks living in the facility, immersing myself in the environment to better understand current care practices and staff perceptions of incontinence care. I would also have the opportunity to introduce and test our prototype and gather key feedback from staff, involving them directly in the innovation process.
Launching the Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program
So, I packed my bags and set out to live onsite at The Glenwood Community. I started off by volunteering as a personal care assistant to help the resident care aides and state-tested nursing assistants with non-direct resident care, and I had shifts both at Glenwood and The Harmar Place Community. I helped with things such as meal times, morning rounds, answering call bells and engaging with the residents. During the second week, once intimate with the staff and environment, I introduced our solution and started to test our concepts and gather feedback directly from the staff I was working with.
This was very different from the traditional models of user testing we had done before, such as holding workshops and conducting user interviews. We were able to become our own participant, so to speak, while developing a deeper connection with frontline staff. The outcomes of this immersive collaboration — a lived experience to understand current care practices in long term care — were invaluable and could not be achieved with the traditional approach.
Not only was I privy to the everyday nuances of caregiving; I was part of the team. I could feel and understand the complexity and challenges of the care environment, and I experienced the deep rewards of caring for the residents. There is a difference between a caregiver telling you how they feel after a whole shift of running around on their feet, and actually experiencing it for yourself. Needless to say, I was exhausted, but I was full of new learnings, ideas and “Ah-ha!” moments.
Not only did we share knowledge and build relationships, but we were amazed to see how staff participated in this process. My working alongside them gave them the opportunity to share their daily experiences, their pains and their little wins. Walking around the unit, they were open with me, offering new ideas and insights that they thought would be helpful to Advosense.
In the resource-constrained, high-paced world of long-term care, it can be hard to find the time to truly engage staff in the innovation process and test out your ideas. This deep immersive collaboration is what made the program really work. Not only did staff find their experience participating in the EiR program very helpful to their daily routine, they enjoyed being part of the brainstorming and sharing their expertise and ideas. As one of the state-tested nurse aides put it, “When I heard about the program, I thought you were just going to stand there and stare at us. Instead, it was really helpful when you were passing meal trays and answering call bells.”
Beyond the frontline staff, the EiR program was a win for everyone at United Church Homes, as Mike Hughes reflected: “During the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, Martina did not hesitate to dive in and help with day-to-day tasks while capturing insights that give us a valuable ‘outside looking in’ perspective to our operations. Our residents also enjoyed participating in the experience, which supports United Church Homes’ goal of fostering collaborative relationships with those we serve — one where independence and opportunities for purposeful pursuits are prioritized.”
Key to getting the most out of the program was being able to be as flexible as the care environment itself. The schedule and design of the usability testing needed to be different from the traditional methods. A mix of informal and formal observations worked well, incorporating both volunteer personal care assistant shifts with methodological data collection. Just like the nursing staff experienced, I found that there was barely enough time to do it all, and I had to learn to prioritize.
Expanding Entrepreneur-in-Residence from Experiment to Model
The EiR program can serve as a model for implementing other co-creation collaborations or for making testing programs easier and more effective. Through the ATC platform, Advosense and United Church Homes were able to easily connect, and within a month we were able to get the right people on board and formalize the partnership. It was such a success that UCH plans to roll out future EiR programs. According to Hughes, “The residency with Advosense has given us the confidence to expand the EiR program with a schedule of available residency windows, and application criteria, to follow later this year.”
Innovation is fast paced and reiterative, as should testing be. The EiR program is a great example of how to model that. Even though I am a nurse, I learned so much from the program. There are so many things to uncover, and you don’t need to be an expert to soak it all in. In fact, entrepreneurs who do not have a background in the field they are innovating in could find it to be especially valuable, at all stages of development. Simple but critical things, such as the layout of the environment, where staff spend most of their time, how they solve little problems — even observing the tricks they use for their daily tasks and the “water cooler talk” — all this information is gold.
Learn more about Advosense at their website, and about United Church Homes at their website and their LinkedIn page.
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