Covenant Health St. Joseph's Home.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
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St. Joseph’s Home in Medicine Hat will be adding new technology Thursday when it receives five Google Assistants for long-term care patients in the palliative care unit.
The Alberta South East Region’s Canadian Mental Health Association is donating the five devices and its executive director says she hopes one day a Google Assistant will be assigned to every long-term care bed in Medicine Hat.
“I would love for us to be able to provide these Google Assistants to people who are living in long-term care so they can connect with family and friends, but also just so they can hear a friendly voice,” said Sandra Milne. “They can say, ‘Hey Google, tell me a joke,’ or ‘Hey Google, read me a story’ so that they’re not lonely.”
Milne says long-term care residents, especially during COVID, don’t get visits from family and friends as often as they would when living at home. She thinks this will continue to be the case after COVID and the Google Assistants will continue to help connect patients to loved ones.
The Google Assistant runs completely off the facility’s wireless internet and costs the residents nothing to use. They will be able to program their family and friend’s phone numbers and vocally ask the Assistant to call someone.
“We have learned that this isolation we’ve been going through is creating negative mental health for people and one of the reasons is that there is no connection. As important as physical connection is, getting rid of that loneliness and having just even a verbal connection with people is important as well,” said Milne. ” … Music, laughter, speaking with someone, all those things improve our mental health.”
Milne says she got the idea from a similar program in Grand Prairie and adds the program will allow patients to connect with the outside world, too.
“They were still able to go into the care homes when the first set of Google Assistants came in and they were walking down the hallway, they could hear people in different rooms,” she said. “There would be one person saying, ‘Hey Google, play me some country music,’ … ‘Hey Google, can you tell me what the top story was on the Medicine Hat News today?’ They’ll ask questions and Google will talk to them.”
The five Google Assistants being donated to St. Joseph’s Home were supported by the Methanex Corporation and Milne says other businesses and individuals can help them reach a goal of 120 Assistants for long-term care beds in the city.
“There is an opportunity for you to purchase one of these Google Assistants, they do actually have them in stock now at all of the stores in Medicine Hat – at Christmas you couldn’t find one, but now you can,” said Milne. “If they purchase one and drop it at CMHA, we will give them a charitable tax receipt for it and we’ll make sure it gets to a long-term care bed, or they can just send us the money and we’ll send them a tax receipt and again, we’ll make sure we purchase one and get it to a facility.”
