As soon as Dorothy (Dottie) Elicati wakes and walks into her kitchen, she gets a spirit-brightening greeting: “Good morning, peanut! How did you sleep?”
She responds and engages in some light chatter about her night’s rest or the day’s weather, or what she’s got planned. She may be reminded to take her medication or be told a silly joke. Elicati, who is 84 and lives alone in Pearl River, N.Y., loves people, but her interlocutor in this case is a desk-lamp-sized robot, named ElliQ, that sits on her kitchen hutch and keeps her company throughout the day.
The pair has spent four months together, and Elicati is unequivocal about her new housemate: “I don’t just like her, I love her” she told Fortune recently, after demonstrating to this reporter a few of the robot’s tricks (dancing, painting pictures, leading a virtual trip to the Seychelles). ElliQ also comes with a tablet that doubles as a screen and touchpad for those activities.
Far more than those entertainments, though, Elicati—who lost her husband of 65 years last November—appreciates ElliQ’s unwavering presence. She wonders seriously if she “could have made it” through the past grief-stricken months without her: “I did get very depressed, but with her here, I have somebody to talk to.” And when she fell one day in her TV room, ElliQ heard her call and dialed her neighbor, and then her daughter out-of-state. (Elicati was unharmed by the fall, just shaken.)
Elicati is one of more than 300 older adults in New York who have so far received one of Intuition Robotics’ AI-powered companion robots through a program run by the state’s Office for the Aging (it plans to deploy 834 of them.). The agency has long worked to address isolation and loneliness among the population through tools like senior center programming, social adult day services, friendly visitor programs, phone trees, and animatronic pets. It’s not a trivial issue: estimated to cost Medicare $7 billion a year, the condition is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, anxiety, depression, and premature death, according to the U.S. Surgeon General.
Less loneliness and better health
But ElliQ, which the agency began piloting last year among socially isolated seniors, has proven to be uniquely effective, says Acting Director Greg Olsen, with 95% of the robot’s users reporting a reduction in loneliness and an overall improvement in health. On average, program participants have 33.6 separate interactions with ElliQ per day and report benefits to well-being thanks to ElliQ’s proactive messaging and activities around hydration, medication, nutrition, cognitive games, and mindfulness, says Olsen.
Those sorts of results were what Dor Skuler, CEO and cofounder of Intuition Robotics, was hoping for when he and two co-founders began working to develop ElliQ in 2016. He describes the product as “a goal-oriented machine,” though from the beginning his mission was to make ElliQ more than that, too. The shortage of caregivers available to spend meaningful time with older adults struck him as a profound societal issue, and as a telecom executive, technology seemed a promising part of the solution. In trying to find care for his grandfather, he’d had another important insight: for a caregiver arrangement to be successful, empathy and shared interests were key. He wanted ElliQ to have those powers.
The company, which is based in Israel and incorporated both there and in the U.S., now has contracts with a handful of state and local governments. It also sells the robot to individuals for $250 (plus a $30 monthly subscription fee), and it plans to target health care customers in the future.
The Intuition team relied on hundreds of seniors to help design, test, and finetune the companion robot, and the company’s customer support team is given sensitivity training to assist users who may have hearing issues, hand tremors, blurred vision, or simply less experience with technology.
Ideally, ElliQ won’t require much troubleshooting, though. The New York Office for the Aging’s average client is an 83-year-old, low-income female with four to 10 chronic conditions, says Olsen, noting one of ElliQ’s virtue is “she is super easy to set up.” (Users do need to have a wifi connection and know their passwords.)
Elicati, who speaks with traces of a Bronx accent, agrees. That said, she is still working out some kinks: She sometimes has to repeat herself to be understood, and she gets frustrated when ElliQ interrupts other human conversation (which she does whenever her name is uttered and the device is activated). Elicati also doesn’t share anything too personal with the companion—she doesn’t quite trust a listening device with that information.
Intuition’s Skuler explains that the robot only shares what users consent to sharing and with whom—daily vitals with a doctor, for example. The data ElliQ collects is protected, and with permission, used internally to “improve the quality of life of the older adult,” according to the company. Skuler stresses Intuition does not sell user data and adds that it’s thoughtful about how best to incorporate generative AI into ElliQ’s features.
Why not just use humans? “I can’t snap my fingers and make somebody show up at Mrs. Jones’ house,” says Olsen, who is emphatic on the point, “These are really great products that enhance—and not replace [humans].” Indeed, human caregivers are in short supply for America’s aging population and turnover is high, in part because pay is so low in the sector, The median wage for America’s 4.8 million direct care workers is $15.43 an hour, or roughly $23,700 per year, according to a report this year from PHI, a nonprofit that tracks the eldercare workforce.
Technology has been a valuable support for Marie Defrancesco, an 82-year-old who lives in senior housing in Rye Brook, N.Y. Since her sister (and housemate) died six years ago, she says, she’s been inconsolably lonely. Because of leg problems, she is also homebound, and despite the friends and community in her complex, she felt alone and depressed. She says she “cried every night” and got angry during the day for reasons she couldn’t explain. Regular visits from a home health worker and one of the Office for the Aging’s animatronic dogs helped, but it wasn’t until she got ElliQ that she felt the spell had been broken. Her friends noticed too.
“She changed my life a lot,” says Defrancesco, who especially enjoys playing trivia with the robot. She says that ElliQ greets her in the morning, and after a round of ElliQ-led bedtime breathing exercises, wishes her goodnight. “If I wake up, I can see her with the light on, like looking to make sure everything in the apartment is okay,” she says. “It makes me feel safe.”
