The importance of ‘home-like’ comforts in your facility

SPONSORED – The aged care industry continues to change and evolve to provide an environment where older Australians can age well and having ‘home-like’ comforts to keep them entertained, engaged and connected with the world around them can help with that process.

With this comes the expectation that aged care providers should offer higher quality entertainment, an increased range of care choices and provide more innovative and accessible technology solutions.

With those goals in mind, Foxtel has worked with a European technology company to develop a smart information and entertainment platform for retirement living and aged care residents.

A clever solution for your business

The Business iQ system is able to transform any television with an HDMI port into an intelligent interactive system that delivers a world of entertainment and information to residents.

There are programs running 24/7, but for those who want to watch something specific at any part of the day, there’s a library of over 20,000 hours of on demand content. 

“Foxtel Business iQ provides residents with a range of channels that cover all genres from entertainment to movies, documentaries to news, sport, music and everything in between,” said Tom Enright, National Manager for Health at Foxtel.

“With Foxtel data showing that on average seniors are spending approximately 38 hours per week watching TV, it’s important that they have a wide choice of entertainment to keep them occupied.”

Having access to classic shows and documentaries can often help residents spark memories from their younger days.

It can also give them the opportunity to reminisce with their peers, helping them to stay social and more settled within the home.

Channels like Foxtel Movies Greats show many classic films such as Some Like It Hot and The Bridge on the River Kwai, while Fox Classics has those TV greats like Hogan’s Heroes and Keeping Up Appearances which many residents can connect over.  

A fully customisable platform

The platform can display your organisation’s branding as well as information about your facility and your own events and services. 

This could be used to display your facility’s weekly dining menu, highlight the monthly activities calendar or promote the in-house hairdresser or exercise classes. 

The system can enable you to select whether residents can access international channels to keep migrant or non-English speaking residents connected to their culture, or you may encourage movement and exercise by offering the exercise channel.

Furthermore, the built-in messaging service allows you to deliver messages on-screen to individuals or groups – a useful tool to provide reminders to the residents of activities happening that day or just to issue important information at certain times of the day. It could even be used to send a resident a birthday greeting on their special day.

A no-fuss system

One particular advantage of the Foxtel Business iQ system is its plug-and-play nature and invisible installation. 

All the smarts are in the Amazon cloud and an easy-to-use operator portal you can access, make changes and check that every box in every room is fully operational. 

“We’re constantly evolving the product and these feature updates are pushed automatically so no need to run software updates,” said Mr Enright.

“The aged care operator does a one-time technology upgrade and it’s supported with a lifetime warranty, meaning we maintain the hardware for the duration of our agreement.”

For more information about the Foxtel Business iQ system, visit their website or call them on 1300 659 466.