Dr. Samantha Sandassie

S7E4: Designing for Inclusivity: Engaging Users for Better Solutions with Dr. Samantha Sandassie

How can one design solutions for one of biggest growing demographics in a way that is unique to its proclivities but sensitive to its diversity? By listening to the experts. One such expert, Dr. Samantha Sandassie from AGE-WELL (a federally funded network for technology and aging), joins host Anika Chabra in this episode. Together they discuss tangible ways in which innovators can adopt a mindset and techniques to better solution and iterate for older adults and their caregivers.

We hear how Samantha’s personal journey as part of a family of immigrants influences the way that she graciously approaches her professional relationships, especially when assembling diverse teams of researchers and partners. Listeners are encouraged to widen their aperture to technological curiosity in older adults, debunking myths and misconceptions. And there’s an invitation to understand the nuances of underrepresented groups in older Canadian adults and caregivers, even before one starts the process of ideation.

If you are an innovator, researcher, older adult, caregiver or have an older adult in your life, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

About our guest:

Dr. Samantha Sandassie is the Director, Education and Training at AGE-WELL, Canada's technology and aging network and Manager for the EPIC - A Health Research Training Platform. She has spent the last 10 years working with researchers, trainees, research professionals and multisectoral partners to build Canada's capacity in AgeTech research and development as well as the deployment of new technologies and technology-related services to support older adults and caregivers. Dr. Sandassie is passionate about supporting our innovators of tomorrow and ensuring they are well-prepared to make positive, real world impact. 

Anika

Welcome back to Root & Seed, a podcast about tradition seekers who are sparked to explore, define, and celebrate their family and cultural identity. I'm your host and Anika Chabra.  In a season about the workplace and community we wanted to explore our lives, relationships and leaders from every angle. From heart-led Carol Ann Lawrie who shared how she embodies the culture of her organization with generosity and empathy to Peter Ahn who is transforming industry by truly advocating for authentic relationships. Both of whom can't be themselves, unless they are self-aware and feel a sense of safety - internally and externally to bring their whole selves to the boardroom table. 

Well, it wouldn't be Root & Seed if we didn't also explore these questions, relationships and inner conflicts from my diverse perspective. And that includes diversity in age. That's why in this episode, we explore how organizations are working to ensure that what they built is right for elder generations, by ensuring our businesses, technologies and research are actively considering the aging population and their specific proclivities.  

Dr. Samantha Sandassie is just the right person to shine a light on this subject. Samantha is an important advocate for innovators within her role at AGE-WELL, a platform designed to bring together technologies and services for healthy aging. At AGE-WELL, Samantha has a keen perspective on research, training and development for products and services to support older adults and their caregivers.  This includes EPIC, their “Early Professionals, Inspired Careers” program that encourages participants to consider the social, economic, environmental, and ethical implications of their work. And helps them to develop ideas, teamwork, and relationship building skills that are the building blocks of a successful career.  We delve into the need for equity and inclusion in all its forms and facets in this very special conversation. 

Samantha, thank you so much for being on the Root & Seed podcast.  

Samantha

Thank you for inviting me. I'm super excited to be here.  

Anika

How would you like to introduce yourself today? What would you like our audience to know about you?  

Samantha

Well, my name is Samantha Sandassie. I am the Director of Education and Training at AGE-WELL, which means that my role is really multifaceted. I do a lot of program development. I work with researchers. I work with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. But I also work with our industry partners, our university partners, government partners and members of the community.  As well, older adults and caregivers. So professionally, that's me. Personally, I'm a mom. I live out in the suburbs with my husband and our fish and, uh, we enjoy a lot of time outside, hiking and gardening and things like that. So pretty, laid back sort of thing, a suburban lifestyle.  

Anika

I love it. Well, tell me the names of your fish.  

Samantha

Oh, that's a question for my daughter. We do have a fish named Hadrian. A lot of our fish are Roman, so we've got, you know, a Caesar. We've got a Hadrian. We've got a Severus, and Septimius.  

Anika

Oh, gosh, it sounds like she's inherited some of your beautiful “mind” genes. She sounds very intellectual,and well read. Talk to me a little bit about your cultural background and potentially some of your lived experiences and how they have informed who you are today.  

Samantha

That's a great question. Originally I'm from Trinidad, from the Caribbean, the most southern Caribbean island you can possibly have. My family moved here, my parents moved here, I should say, in the 80s, and I followed along in the 90s. I want to say about ‘94, ‘95, and I was 9 years old at the time. So, moving to Canada in grade 4, grade 5 was a bit of a shocker, coming from a very laid back lifestyle, let's say. One with you know, beach time on the weekends, but very focused, school life to Canada, where things were a little bit different. Getting to understand a North American culture, which I would say is distinct from the one that I grew up in, was a bit of a challenge, but it's one of the things that I think really emphasized to me very early on and is something that I think now - that we're all very different. We all bring very different values and skills to the table. So meeting people where they are is one of those foundational things that I take to my professional life and personal life that really is impacted by my time as an immigrant.

Anika

Oh, that's beautiful. It's so true. It's such a nice way of articulating that. So what is the value of understanding your full identity? You talked about one really beautiful example about “meeting people where they are”. Why do you think people should take the time to understand who they are, um, as they show up into the workplace?  

Samantha 

Oh, that's so foundational to everything that you are, who you are and, and who you show up as to other people. This sounds very trite, but if you don't know who you are, how do you know where you're going? How do you know where you're going to end up or, or how you're going to interact with the context that you're currently in right now? So taking the time to really reflect on not just your cultural background, but all the other things that come with that, all the intersectional things that come with that, you know, not just culture and race, but also sex and gender. Your family may have a religious background, for example, understanding all of that and figuring out what you think of as important really helps you to not just appreciate how others who have the same sorts of characteristics that make up their identity, but they do help to inform how you interact and engage and appreciate those characteristics as well. And I think that appreciation is something that really needs to show up,, in the workplace for sure.  

Anika

So Samantha, one of the reasons why we wanted to talk to you in particular is, we know the organization AGE-WELL well, and we just love the diversity of the people in the lives that you touch in your function as, as somebody who looks after the learning development and all the other beautiful things that you mentioned in your intro. There's such a diversity to the function of the people that come and show up, the researchers , the students, the healthcare workers as well. How does that diversity of function play into the tapestry of the learning and development that you have cultivated at AGE-WELL?

Samantha

That's a very good question. The diversity that we see that my portfolio sees every day is tremendous. We're getting graduate students and postdocs, undergraduate students from 80 different institutions in Canada. That's not counting the ones that are from overseas. We get professors from 50 to 60 different institutions in Canada, government as well, and everyone's coming from rich, not just academic background and a rich intellectual background, but they're also coming to us with specific ideas about how they tackle and how they approach the issue of aging in Canada and what aging means.  So one of the things that we find really fascinating here is how we all interpret and understand what aging means and how our backgrounds, whether it's academic, intellectual, cultural - it really impacts how we build our solutions, or explore the challenge that we are trying to solve when it comes to aging in Canada.  

Anika

I love that notion, Samantha. Your values and your background help to inform what aging means. I think that's a really interesting layer that helps to really affect the academic and intellectual skills that people are bringing to the workplace and into the functions of all the research projects that you touch. Can you give us an example of how that potentially has shown up?  

Samantha

Oh, absolutely.  When we think about cultural backgrounds and differing values when it comes to the family as a unit, for example, that's probably the easiest example I can use of individuals with more collective identities tend to be more open to things like multigenerational households or working with their parents or grandparents as they age to help them age in place and in their homes specifically, right? I think of myself, for example. The expectation for me is simply that as my in-laws age, they will move in with us and we will care for them. That sort of thing isn't necessarily as prevalent in some other cultures. So you get,things like more research into technologies that can support individuals to age in place while caregiving from afar, rather than caregiving, within the same home, or for example, more research into long term care and other  potential ways of housing that are, that are different from that multi generational household.So we do get a full range of technologies and solutions covered when you think of just housing and family. 

Anika

Is there an innovation that excites you that is helping to tackle some of those? 

Samantha

Oh, I don't know if I can name them all because we have so many incredible researchers. We fund over 300 researchers. We have over 1,500 graduate students alone working on fantastic research that some of it is at an early stage, so they're just really understanding the challenges now, particularly in this Canadian context. But then there are others that are further along that have developed things  like smart home technologies or smart kitchens. For example, I'm going to use an example that would have been very important to my family because food is really important to my family,culturally. It's the center of our life, right? So there is one project that's based in Quebec called “Cook” that helps guide older adults that are living with MCI or early stages of dementia and helps them to continue cooking in their kitchen because we know that,  as dementia progresses, sometimes challenges and in activities of daily living really limits, independence and autonomy and I'm thinking of someone like my mother. If we had taken away the ability for her to cook for her family, that would have been such an emotional blow. So a project like Cook to me shows that, you can bring those cultural values and those personal values into later stage life regardless of, cognitive or, or even physical, abilities. So I find that sort of innovation particularly exciting.  

Anika

It sounds like from a professional standpoint, it definitely has your seal of approval, but also from a personal standpoint, it touches your heart. So love that as an example. 

Samantha

It sure does.  

Anika

It's such an interesting notion to think about how that can help, these underrepresented groups show up in places that potentially didn't have access to before.  How and why is that important for the industry, the age tech industry to have that diversity as we're coming up with solutions to, to better the future of aging in Canada? 

Samantha

That's a great question. And when we think about just Canada itself, we see that the population is diversifying pretty dramatically. And with that, it means that aging is changing dramatically and the expectations of what it means to “age well” has changed as well. So being able to have not just a diverse group of researchers on this, is important for diversity itself for them as individuals to be in these fields and in these positions, but also because the way they can, they bring their own identities into their research, the way they conduct research and the way they think about, particular problems helps us to get better outcomes and better results.

For example, having our Indigenous scholars work on Indigenous community based research to look at technologies that could be made culturally safe for Indigenous communities is, I think, particularly important. We think of the Black communities in Canada, and we have a number of research groups looking at  the different experiences of, of aging as a Black individual. The West Coast of Canada versus Toronto, because these are very different experiences, so it means that we get a better understanding of our stakeholders, the aging person themselves and their families, but also ensure that the systems and the technologies, the solutions that are developed are appropriate for them as well. 

Anika

Samantha, one of the things that I think you did really nicely was talk about the biases that exist within the industry. But when we look outside the industry,  what are the biases that an everyday Canadian may have to the industry that is impeding full and true inclusivity, to be in existence, if you will? 

Samantha

For sure. When we think about technology and we think about aging, we don't generally put those two things together.  When you think about ageism, for example, and popular conceptions of aging, technology as a solution doesn't seem to necessarily be something that younger people think of, first and foremost. They think of technology as something for them, but not something for their parents or their grandparents.  On the flip side, one of AGE-WELL's actually a couple of AGE-WELL's early studies showed that 60 to 70 percent of older adults, of older Canadians, are pretty comfortable with technology.And technology to help them age in place longer, technology to help them manage their chronic conditions. For example, these are things that older adults want and are comfortable with right now. But yet we do think of technology as something to be a little bit beyond, or perhaps not necessarily appropriate for older adults and what our surveys and  our interviews with older adults and caregivers themselves show that that simply isn't true. They're ready to use technology. And quite frankly, most people have a cell phone. That is an incredibly powerful part of a piece of technology right here that you could use to help you age well at home. So I would say that that's one of the interesting barriers that we have because it does come through,with some, early stage researchers as well, not realizing that, oh yeah, actually, no, we can do this. We can create this type of solution and it can be used by this population and used very well.  So I would say that's probably one of the biggest ageism pieces that we confront that we see on a regular basis. And it's, it's interesting because it's an easy one to debunk.

Anika

So true. My 83 year old father is so comfortable with technology. Actually, for his senior center, he is the one who updates the websites and puts the 60 year olds to shame!  So it is a misconception. 

Samantha

It is absolutely a misconception. And there's such an excitement about learning a new piece of technology that that's there that I feel, uh, we don't, we don't see with certain other age groups, right? So there's, we've. For example, my generation grew up with technology. We take it for granted that we could learn something new. Whereas an older population, your 83 year old dad, for example, he's excited because he learned something pretty awesome that I guarantee you most 30 year olds don't know how to do. 

Anika

He’ll love to hear that!

Samantha, I am going to ask you some questions from our workplace conversation cards, if you're game.  

Samantha

I am. Bring it. All right. 

Anika

Let's do this. In the category foods. What are some of the meal staples for your family? 

Samantha

Oh, um,  for my family and the family of my husband, my daughter and I, I would say, we eat a lot of rice. So, I have a South Asian background. My husband's Chinese. So rice is one of those things where we come together, that's for sure. Uh, we do eat a lot of, um, Chinese food in particular, so we eat a lot of stir fries, is very much a South Asian thing too. So on my side, a lot of curries, uh, on his side, a lot of stir fries and underpinning it all, the foundation of rice. 

Anika

That's so true Asians, we love our rice. 

Samantha

We really do.  What would we do without it? 

Anika

I don't know. Actually, I don't know. I actually have cravings. I really do like to have it 2 to 3 times a week. I feel like I need to have a good bowl of rice. 

Um,  just as we conclude Samantha, you know, I'm thinking that they are and I'm hoping that there are some really interesting emerging entrepreneurs that would be interested in hearing this podcast. And so if you were to speak to them, and they're embarking upon, the beginning of their journey and conception of an idea, bringing it to market, prototyping, all that other fun stuff, what should they be mindful of as they think about how to show up in a way that brings inclusivity to their work, but also to inspire, a solution with inclusivity at its core, if you will. 

Samantha

I would say that they should remember that if they speak to one older adult, if they're designing for older adults or caregivers, they've only spoken to one older adult.  So ensure that as you're designing, as you're iteratively designing, hopefully. That you engage with as many potential end users, stakeholders as possible, stakeholder engagement and co design are two of the most important methods,  I would say, for innovating well that you could possibly take advantage of getting feedback from people, real people who can use your product. You may use your product in the future and can give you honest feedback on whether something would work for them is invaluable. It does take longer. It means that  building your solution will take a longer time, but I promise you that you will have a better solution at the end of the day if you take the time to just talk to people. 

Anika

That's a great way to end this. I think the diversity that exists in the aging community is misrepresented or we're trying to paint everybody with the same brush, just like all the other groups in Canada. So, thank you for mentioning that. I think that'll go a long way.  

Samantha, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your personal stories, which I think are beautiful, and just leaving us with a real desire to understand ourselves, but also understand our audiences and understand how we can better the solutions for such an important, important segment of the Canadian population - and increasingly so.

Samantha 

Thank you so much. It was exciting to be here.

Anika

Is it just me, or do you want to reach out to an elder in your life and see how you might be able to learn how technology may enable them to live longer and their resonance of choice and with purpose and dignity?  Samantha and the group at AGE-WELL are doing such important work.  We'll also be diving deeper into how this work benefits younger generations. 

But first we wanted to introduce you to a social impact leader from Genwell, a movement that exists to address the issues of social isolation, disconnection, and loneliness through their power of human connection. Loneliness isn't just for seniors. It impacts our entire population. And with Bobbie Breckinridge, we explore the life-changing benefits of social programs in one of the hardest hitting episodes we've ever recorded. 

This episode was hosted by me, Anika Chabra, executive produced by Jenn Siripong Mandel and edited by Camille Blais. Bye for now.

Episode Credits

Hosted by: Anika Chabra

Brought to you by: Root & Seed

Executive Producer: Jennifer Siripong Mandel

Sound Editing by: Camille Blais

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