Aging & Engaging on Alexa: Engaging Workouts for Any Age

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  Energy Up Adaptive Fitness is a fun work out to techno music that stimulates the energetic system and gets people laughing.

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  Yoga for Daily Life Movement builds flexibility and balance while reducing stress and improving mental health.

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  Enhancing Immunity through Breath & Movement uses breathwork and movement patterns to reduce stress and improve memory.

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  Adaptive Fitness & Strength Training builds strength which is key to keeping bones and muscles strong as we age.

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  Latin Dance is a fun cardio workout that boosts heart and lung health while oxygenating the whole body.

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  This is the modern senior - strong, real people with real bodies that are happy and excited about this phase of their lives.

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  All our classes are adaptive and tailored for building physical and mental health.

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  Our mission is to show the world that seniors are strong and capable of living the life they want at any age.

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  Community and socialization are a core part of all our classes, reducing loneliness and isolation.

Inspiration

Alive, Fit & Free's mission is to make accessing engaging, adaptive fitness classes as easy as possible for seniors. Post pandemic, 90% of seniors want to age at home and maintaining good health has become seniors' primary concern - but only 23% of seniors currently meet the CDC exercise guidelines. This is due to isolation and loneliness, intimidation due to classes that don't cater to the skills and abilities of seniors, and lack of diverse, engaging classes that get them excited to workout. Alive, Fit & Free provides engaging, adaptive, virtual fitness classes for seniors and considers an Alexa Skill an integral part of ensuring easier access to classes for seniors, who often struggle with accessing technology. The inspiration for this project is to ensure that seniors can access engaging fitness classes tailored to their needs, interests, and abilities that empower them to stay independent, happy, and active as they age - regardless of their technical skills.

What it does

Our Alexa skill allows seniors to access pre-recorded fitness classes on the Alexa Echo Show 5, Echo Show 8, and soon on the Echo Show 15. The classes are taught by top senior fitness experts in the country who lead the users through exciting cardio, strength, balance, and flexibility classes that can be done seated, standing, or supported to cater to any ability or fitness level. Although the classes are pre-recorded, the method we use to create our classes makes the user feel as if they are interacting with a live instructor. We prioritize engagement and conversation with the users to not only improve health through physical exercise, but to reduce loneliness and isolation, suffered by 43% of seniors, that greatly impacts mental and emotional health. Our classes target physical, mental, emotional, and energetic health of seniors to ensure they are not only getting the physical activity they need, but their mood is also boosted. As our instructors are experts in fitness for aging well, our classes speak to seniors' specific health and wellness concerns as well as personal interests.

To use the skill, users just say "Alexa, open Alive, Fit & Free" and they are presented a list of videos on the screen. They can then choose a video by selecting the video number or tap the video on the screen.

How we built it

We built it using the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Programming language. Our developers followed several examples and took multiple tutorials to build this customer skill. We are using AWS to host and stream the videos.

Challenges we ran into

Navigating and using APL is not as simple as we had hoped. It was daily complex to get the user experience for both voice and touch and we did not find many good sample tutorials.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1. We have created our classes to be truly accessible by people of any age or ability. Our oldest user is Lois, a 101-year-old living independently in her home in California. She got Covid-19 in January 2022, and attributed our breathwork and cardio classes to her ability to survive the disease after doctors told her she had little chance of making it through. She now serves as an Alive, Fit & Free ambassador and introduces our classes to friends in her neighborhood.
2. We aimed to bring the most diverse, exciting classes tailored to the abilities of any age, and we work with an instructor base of 20+ instructors globally that are experts on health and fitness for aging well.
3. Bringing a new way for seniors to access diverse fitness classes from fitness instructors through an Alexa skill reduces many barriers seniors face in currently accessing classes online and ensures more seniors can improve their quality of life and get the classes tailored for their unique needs, interests, and abilities - which is key to helping them live better for longer.

What we learned

1. While creating our classes, we have learned first-hand how important socialization and human connection is for the mental health and happiness of seniors. We have incorporated conversation and socialization as a key part of all of our classes to bring not only physical fitness, but also human companionship to our users.
2. We learned that audio is one of the preferred methods for seniors to communicate, build human connections, access services, and chat with friends.

What's next for Aging & Engaging on Alexa: Engaging Workouts for Any Age

After testing this skill, we aim to offer a paid version where users can access our entire library of 50+ on-demand adaptive workouts for aging well. This will allow users to experience more diverse workouts with various instructors that target different aspects of their health, all contributing to physical, mental, emotional, and energetic health.

Built With

• apl
• cloudfront
• lambda
• node.js
• node.js-on-lambda
• s3