This article is sponsored by TSOLife. In today’s fast-paced senior housing landscape, real-time, data-driven insights are becoming the new standard. TSOLife is leading that shift with its new platform, a first-of-its-kind solution that reimagines resident engagement through person-centered data and actionable AI. In this Voices interview, TSOLife Founder and CEO David Sawyer shares how TSOLife’s platform Minerva is changing the game, why traditional engagement strategies fall short, and what operators can expect when they adopt a smarter, more connected approach to resident experience.
Senior Housing News: What life or career experiences have most shaped your approach to the work you’re doing today?
David Sawyer: When I was young, my family lived with my grandparents, and that experience gave me a deep, emotional connection to seniors. As I got older and both of my grandparents faced serious health issues, one with Alzheimer’s, the other with advanced dementia, I was closely involved in their transition to senior living communities. It was personal. I saw the loneliness firsthand.
My grandmother was fiercely independent. She had her bridge group, her friends, her routines. But once she entered a community, it was like she became invisible. We watched her quality of life slip away, and not long after moving in, she passed. That experience changed everything for me. It made me realize that no one should feel invisible in their own home.
That’s why we’re so focused on arming communities with the information they need to do better. I genuinely believe most people in this industry are here for the right reasons, so our mission is to give them the tools to follow through on that vision.
Is your new platform Minerva a redefinition of resident engagement, or are you creating a new tech solution?
We’re not just redefining resident engagement, we’re building a whole new category of technology. Traditional engagement software has focused on keeping residents busy or entertained, but our approach is fundamentally different. We’re using technology to improve quality of life and quality of experience in a real, measurable way.
That starts with personalization. We look at every resident’s quality of life and length of stay, and we operationalize that across the entire community. We’re aggregating data from across the industry and applying advanced analytics, business intelligence, and AI to generate personalized, experience-driven plans for each resident. That means designing plans that deepen connection and improve daily life to ultimately extend length of stay.
Where legacy engagement tools are about activity, ours is about outcomes. We’re building software that directly supports the mission of improving lives through personalized, data-driven connection.
Why is resident engagement not enough on its own?
When you think about traditional resident engagement, it always comes back to the three big Bs: birthday parties, bingo, and, well, I can’t even remember the third one. That right there tells you everything. For too long, senior living has been about keeping everyone in a room and occupied. But that model just doesn’t work anymore.
From the data we’ve collected, over 90% of residents prefer small group engagement over large group events. And more residents are looking for learning opportunities to improve their quality of life, not just creative or craft-based activities. Yet if you look at most community calendars, you’ll find a ton of arts and crafts but maybe one continuing education session a month. That mismatch matters.
In social science, if you’re not tying what you’re doing to the outcomes you’re trying to achieve, you could actually be causing harm. Historically, the only engagement KPI that mattered was attendance. If residents were going to events, they were considered socially connected and happy. If they weren’t, they were labeled isolated or depressed. But our research found the opposite is often true. Residents who attend fewer events sometimes have a higher quality of life because they’ve already built strong, small-group friendships. On the other hand, the residents going to everything are often trying to find connection.
So the old metrics steered us wrong. They encouraged staff to ignore residents who were showing up, assuming they were fine, when those were the people most in need of help. Engagement can’t be about volume, it has to be about relevance.
That’s where personalization comes in. We can now use evidence-based, KPI-driven methodologies to identify which residents are actually at risk of depression or social disconnection and design engagement around their specific needs. For example, we identified a group of residents with low quality of life and stability issues due to inactivity. Out of 15 physical events on the calendar, the only one they’d reliably attend was chair yoga. So while the calendar looked full, the real impact was limited. Without the right activity for the right resident, it’s just noise.
That’s why we’re building a data-driven approach to engagement, so communities can stop spinning their wheels and actually move the needle on resident quality of life.
In a time when everyone is promoting AI, what sets TSOLife’s AI engine apart from the rest?
Well for one, we actually built it. We didn’t just slap a white-labeled wrapper on ChatGPT and call it innovation. We put in the hard work. We’ve processed over 150,000 resident profiles and nearly 100,000 hours of recorded interviews, much of which had to be manually data-mined. That means tagging, structuring, and training AI to understand how to pull insights from unstructured conversations. And we did all of it by hand before scaling.
From there, we formed actionable insights by observing real-world outcomes. We tracked how changes impacted quality of life, how satisfaction shifted based on executed recommendations, and we trained our engine on that feedback loop. Our data science team built Python-based algorithms around all of it. So this is real AI, not a gimmick.
If you’re just plugging a ChatGPT wrapper into your platform and asking it to generate engagement ideas, you’re relying on whatever data’s been dumped into its training set. And that training set probably wasn’t built on senior quality-of-life scores. It was built on internet chatter, textbooks, Reddit threads, whatever the Silicon Valley crowd decided to feed it. That’s not only misaligned with senior living, it can be flat-out harmful if used blindly.
At its worst, AI becomes a professional liar, confidently wrong and disconnected from reality. We see vendors in senior living slap together tools overnight and pretend they’re doing something groundbreaking. But you look at the real work being done around things like fall detection—those models took serious time, observation, and expertise to build. Predictive analytics doesn’t happen by accident.
True AI takes advanced math, machine learning, data science, and domain expertise. If your tech vendor can’t show you that foundation, you’re not buying technology, you’re buying vaporware.
What ethical standards are in place as TSOLife develops its AI?
At TSOLife, we don’t use unsupervised learning, period. Every AI response goes through human oversight to validate that it’s appropriate and won’t cause harm. We’ve built a review loop that flags outputs as good or bad, and if something misses the mark, we dig into why. That way, we’re training the model before it ever touches an end user, not learning at their expense.
Everything we release is reviewed by real people, even our data. AI transcription, for example, is only 95–98% accurate on a good day, and that number drops when working with seniors. Most models struggle to capture soft-spoken speech or non-standard patterns. It’s not a human listening; it’s machine vision trying to match waveforms to words. That’s why we reinforce every output with layered review to ensure factual accuracy and relevance for older adults.
You can’t just plug in a generic tool and expect it to work for seniors. We treat this population with care, and that starts with a do-no-harm mindset. Seniors are in a vulnerable place, and it’s on us to respect both their privacy and their experience. They didn’t get to train the foundational models powering today’s AI. So if you’re using a general-purpose tool, the suggestions it gives reflect what a 20-something engineer thinks older adults want, not what they actually need. That’s why we take a slower, more deliberate approach. The “move fast and break things” mindset doesn’t work here.
This is also a cautionary moment for the industry. Eight years ago, we saw a flood of point solutions come in, looking to make a quick buck. Operators got burned. Now with AI, I’m seeing it again, companies launching “companion apps” overnight, clearly built on generic prompts or Alexa templates. It’s not thoughtful tech; it’s opportunism targeting social isolation, and it could backfire.
We’ve got a real shot to get it right this time, but only if we learn from the past and stay focused on the outcomes that matter.
What is the ROI for operators who adopt Minerva?
We’ve put a lot of time into calculating ROI, and the research is phenomenal. One of our recent hires is a VP of Data and Insights whose previous role was all about tying ROI to ad campaigns, analyzing whether specific campaigns actually moved the needle. We brought him in to run that same kind of analysis on our platform, and the results were eye-opening.
He looked at the quality of life scale we use, which is a world-class tool recognized by the WHO and CMS with five core questions, plus a one-question self-rated health score. What he found was that resident quality of life is directly correlated to length of stay, with a P-value of 0.00001. That’s as strong a correlation as seatbelts and survival rates or cigarettes and cancer. It’s not a guess, it’s a statistical fact.
Here’s what that means in practical terms: For every one-point increase on that five-point scale, you gain an average of 85 additional days of length of stay. If you take someone from “very poor” to “excellent,” you’re adding over a year. We’ve seen this in data from over 150,000 residents, across five years of longitudinal research. It’s real, and we’re now working with research institutions to help publish and validate it.
Even better, we’ve proven that our software can raise quality of life scores by more than 15% across the board. That’s a measurable and meaningful jump. When you run the numbers, that improvement translates to about $12,000 in additional revenue per resident, per 85-day gain. We’re not just talking hypotheticals, we can forecast ROI based on your community’s census and residents’ current scores.
We’ve got a white paper coming out soon that breaks all of this down and the data nerd in me is pretty fired up about it. We did the work, we’ve got the proof, and we’re excited to help operators turn quality of life into real, trackable business impact.
In the senior living industry, 2025 is being defined by…
…the tech renaissance.
There’s more capital flowing into the industry than ever, both on the REIT side and from private equity and venture capital backing tech companies. We’re also seeing huge leaps in system capabilities and innovation.
Some software vendors are going to build truly game-changing solutions that help the industry redefine itself. Others are going to burn through funding, get acquired, or disappear entirely. It’s going to be a wild ride, and it’ll reshape senior living in a big way.
For operators, this is not the time to sit on the sidelines. The technology coming out right now is going to fundamentally change how you run your business. If tech isn’t already baked into your strategy, you’re going to get left behind. Data has replaced cash as king. And the more you have, the smarter your decisions, and the better your outcomes.
The operators who get really good at building the right tech stack and creating a tight, integrated ecosystem are going to win. They’ll deliver better results to their financial partners and come out ahead as the industry shifts.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TSOLife is the creator of the first resident experience, insights, and intelligence platform Minerva, and is excited to continue leading the industry with AI solutions that address operators’ need for more than resident engagement. To learn more, visit tsolife.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
