Front Porch Creates New Balance Center For Senior Living Residents With Future Expansion Possible

Senior living nonprofit Front Porch is launching a new center that uses new technology and equipment to help improve the wellbeing of independent and assisted living residents through balance and fitness.

The operator, which has more than 50 communities nationwide, is launching a new brain and balance center at its Carlsbad By The Sea community in Carlsbad, California. The organization is currently undertaking light renovations at the community to accommodate the new Brain and Balance Center.

The new center is slated to use new technology and equipment from makers such as S3 and SMARTfit to help residents improve balance and cognitive function, according to Carlsbad By The Sea Director of Fitness and Wellness Lisa Dickenson. The center will be applied first to indpendent living and assisted living before potential rollout to additional Front Porch communities, including memory care, in the future.

“It’s been a complete shift in perspective on how we look at our residents,” Dickenson told Memory Care Business. “We’ve realized they have much more potential than they often see in themselves, and the challenge is helping them recognize that.”

While Gendale, California-based Front Porch is starting with one community in California, it has plans to build a comprehensive program to be used across the company’s portfolio in the future.

The new balance center and expansion plans represent a deepening of programming and services for Front Porch, which in 2022 began swapping skilled nursing units for memory care to meet incoming demand.

New center to help residents ‘change the image of how they see themselves’

Front Porch plans to assess residents using the new center to benchmark their progress over time.

The program has already helped residents improve their balance and cognition and become more confident with everyday movements and actions, like riding an elevator without holding onto the railings for balance,according to Dickenson.

“We can help people change the image of how they see themselves and the potential that they have, and that’s pretty powerful,” Dickenson said.

Dickenson is partnering with a physical therapy assistant to assess residents for things like balance on a weekly basis.

The center also will assess residents using a device that can “gamify” certain aspects of cognition, including executive function, short-term memory and long-term memory. The device includes a “game of the week” for residents to test cognition.

Balance is important to Front Porch and its residents due to the prevalence of falls in senior living.

Fall-related injuries are one of the most common injuries for older adults, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting that 1 in 4 older adults falls each year in the U.S., with an estimated 36 million falls being reported annually by people 65 and older. Public health data also shows that approximately 3 million older adults are treated in emergency department visits annually due to fall-related injuries.

Through Front Porch’s Center for Innovation and Wellbeing, the organization will be able to research, pilot and scale solutions to all of the operator’s communities. Front Porch seeks to expand the program in the future by standardizing its curriculum and buying more exercise equipment.

“When I connected with Lisa, I started thinking about what communities this can work in, in terms of enthusiasm from other wellness directions and considering the space and population because each community is so different,” said Innovation and Wellbeing Center Operations Manager Jennifer Lee.

The overall goal is to create new standards for fall risk and prevention, Lee said.

“We want to essentially duplicate the X-factor that Lisa has stood up at Carlsbad by the Sea,” Lee said. “When it comes to scaling and timeline, we’re always really intentional to start small and slow.”

In the months that follow, Front Porch will collect data regarding the new center’s success and determine the best path ahead to scale the model at other communities, from independent living and assisted living to memory care.

“I think the program that Lisa started has applications in all demographics and that’s the beauty of it,” Lee said. “She made it universally beneficial to really all residents and she’s found a way to scale it to different ability levels.”

The post Front Porch Creates New Balance Center for Senior Living Residents With Future Expansion Possible appeared first on Senior Housing News.