Edmond Assisted Living Facility Goes High Tech to Protect Residents

An Edmond assisted living facility is striving to better protect their residents by identifying health problem before they occur.

Saturday, September 11th 2010, 11:40 pm

By: News 9


By Jon Jordan, NEWS 9

EDMOND, Oklahoma -- An Edmond assisted living facility is striving to better protect their residents by identifying health problem before they occur.

Copperlake Estates can't foresee the future, but a new piece of technology called QuietCare maybe able to help determine if there are unforeseeable health problems with their residents.

"It's a motion sensing technology that doesn't hear or see anything, but it's smart technology in the sense that it has the capacity to learn the patterns of a residents behavior," said Scott Abendschein the Director of Copperlake Estates.

Abendschein explained that if a resident began making abnormal amount of visits to the bathroom or even worse, stopped moving, QuietCare would recognize the resident's behavior wasn't normal causing the system to sound an alarm alerting the staff of a potentially dangerous situation.

"We can't always be in the apartment, we can't always be there with the resident, so we can't always know what is going on," said Skye Statum administrator and lead nurse at Copperlake Estates.

Statum said QuietCare is changing how staff is able to protect their residents.

"We still check on the resident. We still have the normal amount of staffing. The technology is just going to help support us," Statum said.

Abendschein said QuietCare is doing what no amount of staff could do, which is providing around the clock protection for the resident.

"We now have the capacity to look forward to extending the life time of a resident living in assisted living because we now have the capacity to understand things that we have not been able to see before," Abendschein said.

Residents at Copperlake Estates welcomed the new technology. Robert McWherter, who spent his career saving lives as a firefighter, said QuietCare has the potential to do the same thing.

"I don't see it being a bad thing, probably a good thing. Every time I get out of bed it goes off, you can see it and at night in the bathroom the same way," McWherter said.

And the system doesn't just help protect the residents. It also has the potential to protect the facilities who use QuietCare. General Electric who makes the technology said resident falls account for 35 percent of the lawsuits filed against assisted living centers. The average cost per lawsuits is around $134,000.

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