Saunas Belong in Senior Living. A Teenager Made the Case.

Families choosing senior living facilities are increasingly asking about brain health. Finnish population data gives them good reason: regular sauna use is associated with a 65% lower risk of dementia. The demand is real. The research is encouraging. And in one count of senior-focused sites in southern New Jersey, four out of five had no sauna.

The person who put that gap on paper was not a sauna manufacturer or a senior living operator. It was a high school student in New Jersey named Ethan Abramovitz, who built a backyard sauna with his father, watched two great-grandparents decline from dementia, and decided to do something about it. He founded a nonprofit called Sauna for Seniors and published a cost-benefit analysis in December 2025. His headline finding: adding prefabricated saunas at the 31 of 39 senior-focused sites in southern New Jersey that lack one, plus five years of educational outreach, would cost a total of $378,750 and could generate $5.6 million to $18.8 million in avoided healthcare costs over five years.

The idea may be even better than the paper realizes. Here is why.

What the paper does

The analysis is not a clinical study. It is an economic model that counts where seniors in one New Jersey region congregate, estimates how many are living with or at risk of neurodegenerative disease, and calculates what it would cost to put a three-person prefabricated electric sauna in each location.

Abramovitz identified 39 candidate sites, including 20 senior residential developments (home to an estimated 8,888 residents aged 65 and older), 15 senior activity and recreation centers, and four YMCA locations. Only eight of the 39 already had saunas. Using 2025 Alzheimer’s Association data, the paper estimates that 10.9% of the cohort is living with dementia and 1.9% with Parkinson’s disease.

The paper then applies a figure from Finnish epidemiological research: a 65% lower risk of dementia associated with frequent sauna use. At a conservative 2.5% adherence rate, the projected five-year savings come to $5.6 million to $18.8 million against a total program cost of $378,750.

The Finnish data that drives the model

The research behind this figure is specifically about traditional Finnish sauna, not infrared. The 65% risk-reduction figure comes from a 2017 paper published in Age and Ageing by Tanjaniina Laukkanen, Setor Kunutsor, Jussi Kauhanen, and Jari A. Laukkanen, drawing on the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD), a long-running Finnish cohort that has produced some of the most-cited findings on sauna and health.

Men who used a sauna four to seven times per week had a hazard ratio of 0.34 for dementia (95% confidence interval: 0.16 to 0.71) and 0.35 for Alzheimer’s disease (95% CI: 0.14 to 0.90), compared to men who used a sauna once per week. It has been widely cited across the wellness and longevity industries ever since.

But the KIHD cohort consisted of 2,315 men, all middle-aged (42 to 60 years old) at baseline, all living in eastern Finland, followed for 20.7 years. No women. No elderly participants at enrollment. And the traditional sauna culture in eastern Finland (high-heat dry sauna with löyly, 175 to 195 degrees Fahrenheit, often multiple times per week as a lifelong practice) is different from what any institutional installation in the United States would deliver. No infrared sauna studies were part of this cohort. A broader study by Knekt and colleagues in Preventive Medicine Reports (2020), which included 13,994 men and women over 39 years, found a more modest hazard ratio of 0.81. The gap between observational association and causal intervention remains open.

What a commercial sauna actually costs

The paper prices each installation at $7,500. That is the lower to low-mid range of the home sauna market and well below what a commercial installation in a senior living facility would actually cost.

A prefabricated three-person residential sauna is built for a duty cycle of roughly 100 to 150 heat cycles per year. A sauna in a senior living community, open to dozens or hundreds of residents, will see 700 or more. Residential warranties are typically voided under commercial use. The heater, the hardware, and the cedar thickness (half an inch in residential units versus three-quarters in commercial) are all designed for a different use case.

Then there is the Americans with Disabilities Act. Federal accessibility standards (2010 ADA Standards, Sections 241 and 612) require a 60-inch wheelchair turning circle inside the sauna room, a fixed accessible bench at least 42 inches long and 17 to 19 inches high rated for 250 pounds, a door clear width of at least 32 inches, a maximum threshold height of half an inch, and controls accessible at 15 to 48 inches above the floor. A standard three-person prefabricated sauna cannot meet these requirements without structural modification that would cost more than the unit itself.

By SaunaNews estimates, a properly specified commercial traditional sauna installation in a senior living facility, including commercial-grade heater, ADA-compliant room build-out, electrical, ventilation, permitting, and labor, lands in the range of $50,000 to $100,000. Larger wellness suites with multiple rooms or architectural integration run higher. The $7,500 figure in the paper would not cover the heater, the ADA modifications, and the electrical work for a single compliant room.

At $75,000 per installation instead of $7,500, the sauna budget for the 31 sites without one rises from $232,500 to about $2.3 million, and the paper’s total program cost rises from $378,750 to roughly $2.5 million. That changes the benefit-to-cost math. It does not necessarily change the conclusion, but a complete version of the model needs a commercial installed cost.

The technology that solves the low-bench problem

There is a reason traditional saunas have tall benches. Hot air rises. In a conventional sauna, the air near the ceiling can reach 226 degrees Fahrenheit while the air at floor level sits around 80 degrees. The best heat is at the top. To get a real sauna experience, you climb.

That physics problem collides directly with the ADA requirements described above. An accessible bench at 17 to 19 inches sits in the coldest zone of the room. Building an ADA-compliant sauna with a conventional heater means giving the accessible user warm air, not hot air. It is a sauna in name but not in practice.

New climate technology changes that equation. Saunum, an Estonian manufacturer, developed a patented air-blending system in collaboration with Tallinn University of Technology that draws superheated air from a ceiling-corner intake cap, mixes it inside the unit with cooler air pulled from about 12 inches off the floor, and discharges the blended mixture at and below bench height. The result, according to Saunum’s published testing data, is a reduction in the head-to-foot temperature differential from roughly 146 degrees Fahrenheit to about 47 degrees, with the air at foot level rising to approximately 149 degrees.

Saunum pitches the Saunum Air L for more intensively used saunas. It is an all-in-one unit combining a 10 to 15.2 kilowatt electric heater with the air-blending climate system. Saunum lists it as UL-listed. By Saunum’s figures, a single-level low-bench sauna would get meaningful heat near seat height instead of the roughly 80-degree air the company measured at foot level without the system.

For facilities that already have a heater and want to add the climate system separately, the Saunum AirSolo Wall installs within the sauna wall rather than standing in the room, so it adds no protrusion into the 60-inch wheelchair turning space that ADA requires.

The implication for senior living operators is practical: an ADA-compliant sauna equipped with air-blending technology can deliver a genuine sauna experience at accessible bench height. It means the accessibility requirement is no longer a reason to build a sauna that only works for able-bodied users who can climb to the top bench. It is a reason to build one that works for everyone in the building.

The business case the paper misses

The Sauna for Seniors model projects avoided healthcare costs at a societal level: $5.6 million to $18.8 million in reduced dementia care spending. That is a public health argument, and it is the right argument to make to a government agency or a public health foundation. The challenge is that realizing those savings means persuading Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurers to fund sauna access as preventative care. That is a long regulatory road with no clear precedent. The operator of a senior living facility does not capture those savings. Medicare does. Medicaid does. Families do. The operator captures rent.

The stronger business case for saunas in senior living is simpler: demand. People want them, and increasingly, people need to believe they are doing something about the disease they fear most.

Dementia is not just a health crisis. It is the health fear that keeps older Americans and their families up at night. In a 2012 national survey conducted by Marist Poll for Home Instead Senior Care, 44% of Americans named Alzheimer’s their single most feared disease, ahead of cancer at 33%. Among Americans over 65, the number rose to 56%. A 2026 Alzheimer’s Association survey of 3,800 adults aged 40 and older found that more than two-thirds worry about developing Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, and 88% rate brain health as “very important.” The USC Schaeffer Center puts the total cost of dementia in the United States at $781 billion in 2025. Those numbers are not abstract to the adult daughter researching options for her mother at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.

A facility that can point to a sauna backed by Finnish research on brain health speaks directly to the fear that is driving the search in the first place.

The senior living industry already knows wellness sells. The National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care and the International Council on Active Aging launched a joint education course on “Wellness ROI” for investors and operators, framing wellness not as a nice-to-have but as a business performance driver. ICAA founder Colin Milner said in the launch announcement that ICAA research shows 71% of senior living communities will be based in a wellness culture by 2030. Ventas, one of the largest senior housing REITs, reported that 215 capital refresh projects across its senior living portfolio since 2022 were followed by a 6.5% increase in revenue per occupied room and a 530-basis-point increase in occupancy. Those were general upgrades, not wellness amenities specifically.

Then there is length of stay. If a wellness amenity helps delay a resident’s cognitive decline by even six months, the operator keeps that resident in independent living (lower staffing cost, higher margin) rather than transitioning them to memory care or losing them entirely. FOX Rehabilitation reported that communities using its wellness programming averaged a 33-month length of stay, against 23 months for assisted living residents generally, with annual move-outs 30% below the national average.

A sauna that costs $75,000 to install and helps keep one resident in independent living for an extra year at $3,000 per month pays for itself in under three years. That is not a public health argument. It is a real estate argument. And it is one senior living operators already understand.

The trial worth watching

The scientific question underneath all of this may be closer to an answer. The FIGHT-AD trial (NCT06023407), published in protocol form in Frontiers in Neurology, is a randomized controlled trial testing whether 10 weeks of heat therapy, delivered as hot-water immersion, changes blood and brain glucose metabolism in older adults at metabolic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Its authors say it will be the first to measure heat therapy’s effect on brain glucose metabolism in that group. Results are pending. If positive, it would add early interventional evidence for one proposed mechanism, and operators who already have the infrastructure will have a head start.

The mechanistic groundwork is in place: heat exposure upregulates heat shock proteins implicated in clearing misfolded proteins, modulates inflammatory pathways, and improves cerebrovascular function. A 2021 paper by Patrick and Johnson in Experimental Gerontology reviewed the broader case for sauna use as a lifestyle practice to extend healthspan. The sauna industry has the science. What it has not had is a deployment strategy for the demographic that needs it most.

The founder and the organization

Abramovitz launched Sauna for Seniors from Voorhees, New Jersey, while still in high school. The organization runs educational presentations at senior centers, a mobile sauna program in partnership with unnamed partners in the North American sauna movement, and support for research on neurodegenerative disease. South Jersey media previewed the group’s June 30, 2025 presentation at Parkers Bend Retirement Community in Moorestown.

The commercial cost estimates in the paper will need to come up, and the benefit model would be stronger if it spoke the language operators actually use: occupancy, rent growth, and length of stay. But those are refinements, not refutations. Abramovitz, still in high school, identified a deployment gap that the sauna industry, with all its trade shows and R&D budgets, has not addressed. The operators who listen first will fill their buildings first.