How to Use Senior Living Digital Signage in Your Care Home

There aren’t many forms of communication that are accessible by all. But digital displays have become a useful tool within senior living communities, not just for their excellent visibility, but for communication with staff members too.

Whether you want to share event schedules or local news with residents; or manage staff workload with internal comms messaging, digital signage software is a powerful tool that more healthcare facilities are waking up to.

In this guide we'll be looking at how to use senior living digital signage and how to get set up using ScreenCloud.

The benefits of using digital signage in senior living homes

Digital signs are already becoming a popular fixture in healthcare, from hospitals to doctors offices and pharmacies. Interestingly, a 2023 study found that digital technology can be a great way to engage with patients with dementia by facilitating meaningful connection in the real world. The study also suggested that technology which focuses on nurturing social connections and activity can have benefits with the elderly.

Looking at digital signage, the most visible aspect tends to be on the patient or visitor facing side, sharing useful information, way finding and directional info, and promotional content.

Printed information is useful, but it's harder to update content, relying on print runs to share important announcements when you might need to share it in real time.

Screens allow for centralized content management, quick updates and multiple usages.

Not only that, screens offer easy to read content which helps to boost engagement with specific announcements.

Within senior living communities, being able to share highly visible and engaging displays in common spaces is perhaps the most obvious benefits. Replacing printed signs means you can quickly share details of upcoming events, protocol updates for resident safety, daily menus and even display real time emergency alerts clearly.

But the other big benefit is communication with staff members. Facility administrators can install digital screens in break rooms to display shift information, staff recognition and even important updates such as inspection dates

Uses of retirement home digital signage

With just a few TV screens you can quickly and effectively create a dynamic and effective network of digital signage for senior living communities. And if you manage multiple facilities, you can also manage screens remotely from your dashboard, making it easy to share useful content and enhance communication across locations.

Here are some of the best uses for senior living digital signage.

1. Share local information

One of the easiest ways to start your content planning is to share relevant or local information.

This could be as simple as the weather, or a calendar of upcoming events that’s synced with your Google calendar. Or it might be streaming local news, sports results or curated content via an RSS feed.

ScreenCloud also offers a variety of content creation tools including our own Quick Post, which uses AI to create professional displays in minutes. A great way to keep residents informed and updated.

2. Displaying community updates

One of the most fun ways to use your digital signage in senior living communities is by keeping residents informed. This can include:

• Event calendars and upcoming activities
• Daily or weekly dining menus
• Community announcements
• Health and wellness tips

This is a great way to improve the resident experience and even help staff by making commonly requested information available in a visible manner.

3. Staff internal communication

Healthcare facilities are increasingly using digital signage solutions to share important staff information such as rota and shift changes, announcements and updates from senior management and even staff recognition.

Digital signage tools such as ScreenCloud connect to popular internal comms tools such as intranet tools, messaging apps and real-time data sources. This means that if you want a channel which shares daily announcements from management in the staff break room, or a visible way to see who is managing which community events then digital signage is a great tool.

Because many staff don't necessarily spend time near a work computer or device, this also means that important announcements don't get missed.

Read more: Internal comms strategy.

4. Resident celebrations

Senior living facilities often revolve around community, so being able to connect residents with engaging and visible information is a great use of screens. Some of the best ways of doing this include displaying birthdays, family celebrations (eg. new arrivals in the family) or even displaying photos of previous events.

You might want to stream photos from the community Christmas party, or highlight an achievement - perhaps one of your residents has raised money for charity with their baking challenge...

5. Meet the team

The senior living industry often sees a lot of different staff in a variety of roles. And with many nursing homes seeing a high turnover of both residents and staff, sharing staff profiles on your digital signs can be a good way to help residents understand who is who.

A simple way to do this is share occasional profile highlights for everyone from nurses and orderlies, to management or specialist service providers.

Running a headshot with a few short facts about a person can be a great way to keep residents informed and engaged and help them understand who is who.

Find out more about healthcare digital signage.

How to set up digital signage displays for your care home

Now you know why to use digital signage in your care home and have some inspiration for the digital content you can offer, we’ll walk you through how to set up digital signage for your care home using ScreenCloud.

1. Choose your hardware

ScreenCloud has been designed to be used with hardware and media players that are affordable for most budgets - or the ones you already own.

You can easily connect to a smart TV, by downloading the ScreenCloud app in the app store. Or, for better control and security, use a dedicated digital signage media player such as our PIXI player. This allows for quick setup and scaling, 99% glitch free streaming, and powerful control such as remote device management.

Check out the full list of recommended digital signage players and hardware here.

2. Set up your ScreenCloud account

The real beauty of ScreenCloud is that you can manage your content from anywhere, as long as you have your laptop with you. To do this, head to ScreenCloud and set up an account. We offer a 14-day trial so you can get your screens up and running without any commitment, and you don’t need to to enter your credit card details.

Once set up, this is where you can add your screens and pair them so that in the future you can add, edit or delete content remotely.

3. Create content

ScreenCloud makes it as easy to upload content to your screens as it would be to upload an image to Facebook. This means uploading files from wherever they’re saved - your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive and supporting the majority of file types such as jpeg, gif, png, and svg, PDFs, powerpoints and Office/iWorks formats.

As well as your own content, you get access to 90+ of our apps, in the ScreenCloud App Store, included in the price of your monthly subscription.

So whether you want to create a Twitter wall, a display of the time from around the world, or a quick noticeboard, you have exactly the tools you need.

4. Create schedules and playlists

With your excellent content and our excellent digital signage platform, all you need now is a way to organize your content and show it in all the right places, at all the right times. This is where the playlist and scheduling features come in.

Simply pick the order in which you want to show your content and the duration for each piece to appear on your display, then schedule it in by day of week.

Getting started with ScreenCloud

Digital signage is more than just some pretty images on screen, it's a powerful communication tool. And in senior living facilities, managing both the resident experience and the staff schedule can be a challange - one that is made more efficient with digital signs.

ScreenCloud is built to surface communication in large organizations, but also to make sharing resident and visitor facing information easier.

Find out for yourself how effective digital signage can be.

Sign up for a free trial, or book a demo today.