Digital care, also known as digital health and social care, is the use of digital services and modern technologies to support and improve the quality of health and social care for an individual. Sentai helps individuals in need of support, their families, and care providers delivering digital care through a voice enabled virtual companion that offers day-to-day lifestyle support, alleviates loneliness and keeps users connected to their circle of care.
No. Sentai is designed to enhance human care, not replace it. Sentai’s solution can enhance and enrich in-person professional care that is already in place, support informal carers, or provide support before more formal care arrangements can be made. For example; this could be offering daily digital check-ins for someone who otherwise doesn’t require daily in-person visits, or to someone who is on a waiting list for care, or someone who just wants some support and a friendly voice in their home. Sentai extends in-person care by providing a continuous digital presence when humans can’t be there.
Sentai is a voice enabled virtual companion for those in need of some extra support in their own home. It’s designed to enable care recipients to live more independently, and provide peace of mind to carers and family. It enhances care through AI-powered natural conversation delivered through the Sentai smart speaker. Sentai helps alleviate loneliness, supports daily routines, tracks medication, and helps users stay well, independent and connected to their family and carers.
Through the Sentai mobile app, and the Sentai Pro dashboard for care providers, Sentai provides visibility and insight into a care recipient’s needs, can highlight emerging issues, and inform carers and relatives if help is needed.
Formal care settings, such as care homes and home care, often face workforce shortages, funding gaps, and rising costs. Sentai offers a solution by using AI and motion sensors to provide carers with insight about the user's daily routines, activities, and wellbeing. This helps carers provide more tailored support without complexity or intrusion, and ensures residents can lead more independent lives.
Sentai is purpose built for the job to act as a caring companion, learns over time, and connects users to their friends, family and carers.
Unlike Alexa, Sentai enables totally natural conversation. This means rather than a single trigger for a single action, Sentai enables a complete conversation with a user whereas multiple topics can be covered, for example for a complete digital check-in with multiple tasks. Sentai can switch tasks easily if users take the conversation somewhere else, whilst it doesn’t forget the original objective of a conversation, for example to remind users of their medication or check their wellbeing.
Sentai analyses conversations to monitor for signs that a user is not well. For example, if a user shows signs that they need help, or may need talk to someone, Sentai can take immediate action, even if this was not the original objective or trigger of the conversation. Sentai can take qualitative information and analyse for specific behaviours that may need attention by a carer or family member. This is unlike lifestyle monitoring solutions that only focus on quantitative insight, such as sensor inputs, and are not able to take verbal feedback from care recipients.
Sentai’s not listening all the time. The microphone in the Sentai speaker operates in a limited listening mode that processes audio locally without recording, storing, or transmitting any data to external servers. Only after the wake word is detected does the speaker begin to send audio data for processing.
We currently support one speaker device per user account. We recommend placing this speaker in the main room of the home, in a corner, facing the room where users spend most of their time awake and engaging in conversation, reminders and tasks. The presence sensors are located in the front of the device, so it’s important they face the room.
We put users at the heart of our product development process. We continually enhance our product based on user and customer feedback, and as new technology that becomes available. We grow our product functionality around our customers’ needs, with the goal to give users more meaningful, personalised and fun experiences every time they interact with Sentai, and care providers and families deeper insight that helps improve the care recipient’s wellbeing and the efficient delivery of care.
Privacy is a priority for us. Sentai uses personal data within the system to improve its service offering, never sells data to third parties, and only shares data with authorized individuals or organisations. Data shared with AI services is anonymised and encrypted and not used to train the third-party AI model itself.
Sentai uses AI to act as an intelligent conversational companion that learns from users over time. AI is used to synthesize speech, convert speech to text and text to speech, create conversational content, and intelligently interpret conversations for outcomes and mood. Sentai intelligently adapts to users’ preferences over time, and uses AI to recognise user preferences, needs and behaviours. We use multiple services to deliver a best-in-class experience, for example Microsoft Azure for Speech-to-Text, and Open AI for content creation and analysis. Sentai is designed to be flexible, provider-agnostic and future-proof. We are continuously evaluating new technologies to enhance its capabilities.
Whilst Sentai can inform carers if a user needs help, it is not an emergency call alarm and is not intended to replace call alarms. Sentai can be used either on its own for its intended purpose as a voice enabled digital companion, or it can be used in conjunction with an existing emergency call alarm.
Yes! Sentai is a learning device and, as such, uses personal data to improve. Sentai only ever uses this data within the system, will never sell your data to third parties, and will only ever share your data with people or organisations that you have expressly authorised. Sentai abides by all relevant legislation, including the Data Protection Act (1998).
No. Sentai has been designed to pose no learning curve for care recipients, as users can interact with it using their own words using natural language. It is not command-based, so there is nothing to remember other than the wake word “Hey Sentai”. It deals well with ambiguous replies, accents, or rambling conversations, and gently nudges users back to the goal of the conversation if needed. In other words, it is almost as good at making conversation as a human!
All of Sentai’s user facing functionality is delivered through a single smart speaker device which can be set up in minutes by carers or relatives using the companion app.
