Building Routines for Healthy Aging using Joy, the TV-Based AI Companion

Using ONSCREEN’s versatile and powerful AI companion, Joy, you can easily create a daily and weekly routines to support your loved one, when you’re not there.  The benefits of these capabilities are numerous, from bringing peace of mind, to supporting daily activities.

Daily Reminders

Let’s start with how Daily Reminders can be used. 

There are important things we would like our loved on to do every single day, and showing these reminders on the TV can be a great way to stay top of mind.  One key activity is taking medication.  We can set up a daily reminder to take morning medications at 8:30am every day.  This would support our loved one to make sure she’s always staying on top of that important morning dose.  Then at 8:55am, we can have Joy check in, and ask our loved one if she’s taken her medication.  By doing this, we can see in the ONSCREEN mobile app what our loved one said, and if she indeed remembered to take her medication.

Another critical element of healthy living is drinking water.  A healthy goal is having at least 8oz cups per day, spread out throughout the day.  For this, we can set up the water reminders, at 10am, 2pm, 4pm and 8pm, assuming that there’s water or other hydrating liquids being consumed with breakfast, lunch and dinner.  These reminders can just pop up on the TV for 30 seconds, providing a gentle nudge.

For our evening medications, we can again set up a medication reminder, plus a visit from Joy to check in and ask if the medication was indeed taken.  We can set the medication reminder at 6:30pm, and the Joy medication check visit at 7:00pm.  Again, the conversation with Joy, and the results of the medication check are visible in the ONSCREEN mobile app.

Finally, to wrap up the day, we can set up one more visit with Joy, allowing our loved one to have a friendly conversation about how her day went, and recent events, and or any other topic that our loved one would prefer.  This provides healthy mental stimulation and a nice way to finish up the day.

Weekly Reminders

Moving towards a weekly view, we can bring some additional social events that keep our loved one engaged with others and socializing with her friends and community.  Let’s take a look at a potential schedule. 

Meeting with friends and maintaining a healthy social life is crucial to our wellbeing and longevity, and ONSCREEN can support this by allowing seamless joining into Zoom through the TV.  Setting up something like a weekly call with friends every Monday would greatly cheer up our loved one’s day.  Using the Tasks and Routines feature, we can set up an automatic join of a Zoom meeting for every Monday at 10am.  This could be friends from the neighborhood, or from around the country, using platforms like Loop Village or GetSetup.  At 10am, the TV will come on (if it’s not already on) and the Zoom meeting will just appear, with nothing for our loved one to do other than have a seat on the couch and enjoy the company.

We can set up similar schedules for a book club on Wednesdays, and a coffee chat with friends on a Friday.   And on Sundays, we can get the entire extended family together through a Zoom call, and have our loved one automatically join this call, that’s scheduled for every Sunday at 5pm.  This is a fun and simple way to connect multiple generations, having the grandkids or even great grandkids connect with our older loved one on a regular basis, sharing what happened that week, any milestones achieved or play some quick trivia.  This kind of engagement has been proved to be incredibly valuable to the cognitive health of older adults, and can help keep our loved ones sharp for years to come.

One-Time Events and Reminders

Now there are things that can also happen that are not always on a regular schedule, and for that we support One-Time Events.  These types of one-off activities might be Telehealth visits, reminders about specific plans, or showing a picture at a specific time, like on a birthday or some other kind of celebration.  The One-Time events can be scheduled just like the daily or weekly events, however they only execute once, without any recurrence.  Let’s look at an example of how this might work.

Your loved one got booked for a Telehealth appointment through Zoom for a specific date.  Using our app, you’re able to simply go in and select the date and time for the Zoom, and provide the meeting code and password for joining this meeting.  Now, at the time of the meeting, the TV will automatically join this Telehealth appointment.  If the appointment is not on Zoom, we also support Synzi and Doxy.me, with more platforms coming soon.  This type of automation frees up a caregiver’s time from having to travel, which is sometimes required to help facilitate the Telehealth appointment.

You can also take advantage of reminders as One-Time scheduled events, for example to set up a reminder to leave the house in order to arrive somewhere on time, or that the family will be coming for a visit at a specific time.  For example if you agree with your loved one that you will come for a visit next Friday at Noon, you can set up a One-Time scheduled Notification at 11am to remind them that you’ll be heading over.

To wrap up, we envision building routines such as this to help support our aging loved ones using AI:

Daily reminders

• Medication at 8:30am
• Morning medication check at 8:55 am
• Drink water reminder at 10am, 2pm, 4pm, 8pm
• Medication reminder at 6:30pm
• Evening medication check at 7:00 pm
• Evening AI visit to talk about life at 8:30pm 

Weekly activities

• Monday: Friend call on Zoom at 10:00am.
• Stretching video on Tue, Thu, Saturday at 9am.
• Wednesday: Book club on Zoom at 2:00pm
• Friday: Friends call on Zoom at 1:00pm
• Sunday: Family Zoom calls at 5:00pm

One-time reminders & activities

• Doctor’s appointment reminder in the morning
• Reminder when it’s time to head out
• Automate joining your loved one to a Zoom Telehealth visit
• If not Zoom, see if the doctor supports Doxy or Sync

Hopefully this article provides you with some helpful information about how ONSCREEN, and Joy the AI Companion can help you and your loved one with scheduled Tasks and Routines.  We’re very excited about receiving more feedback about this new feature, and we appreciate hearing from you about it.  Let us know how it goes!