Interesting AI companion for elders to help fend off loneliness and provide support.
I don't have any personal experience with this product/service but thought it was a very interesting solution -- and it's probably just the beginning for similar products/services to enter the market.
I was not compensated in any way to create this post.
FYI it doesn't look like a person, it's a small device that looks more like a desk lamp and uses a tablet as the interface.
"ElliQ is an AI-powered robot companion for older adults—designed to look friendly and approachable while delivering proactive, emotionally engaging support.
What Is ElliQ?ElliQ is a tabletop AI companion robot created by Intuition Robotics to help older adults stay connected, active, and emotionally supported while aging independently. Unlike traditional voice assistants, ElliQ initiates interaction, offering a uniquely empathetic and human-centered companion experience.
Key Features & Functions
Proactive Engagement
- Initiates check-ins, conversation, and suggestions without needing prompts.- About 50% of interactions are initiated by ElliQ itself.
Daily Companionship & Activity
- Offers friendly greetings, wellness reminders (sleep, hydration, medication)- Suggests physical (short walks, exercises) and mental activities (games, news, creativity)- Includes video calls, music, audiobooks, and “digital excursions” like museum tours
Emotional Connection
Designed with a minimalistic, expressive form—soft lighting, gentle movement—to foster warmth without pretending to be fully human
Well-Being & Health Monitoring
Reminds users of routines and helps set wellness goals
The ElliQ Caregiver Solution adds a connected app for caregivers to receive non-intrusive updates on sleep quality, activity changes, or emerging health concerns
Subscription-based: one-time $249.99 Set-up + $59.99/month
((( I'm not sure if this includes the cost of wifi service)))
Real-World Impact & Reception
Positive outcomes: Users interact with ElliQ over 30 times per day, 6 days a week. Around 95% report reduced loneliness and enhanced well-being.
Launched commercially in March 2022, ElliQ is now deployed through partnerships with agencies supporting seniors in states like New York, Florida, Michigan, and more.
While many find comfort and support in ElliQ, it should remain a supplement, not a replacement, for human social interaction."
https://elliq.com
Source: ChatGPT
Alva, love your comments!
And I am not saying that to be nice, ( I am nice but not that nice) but I really love and value your opinions.
Here you are and a little older than many of us, except for Golden and love her as well. And supportive and incredibly helpful, no doubt many times your comments kept me together. I am saying older just for a sake of discussion in the nicer possible way because age does not matter as person’s value doesn’t change with age.
And here is the problem, we don’t value older and wiser in our culture.
I went to many countries and lived in 4 and never saw so little regard for elderly as in NA.
I saw respect in other countries.
I saw in Italian villages when older people go for their daily bread and spent hours socializing, stopping for coffee, at the local square, going with younger ones for evening gelato.
Enough said, but isolation is real here.
We cannot replace it with AI.
There is already lots of lawsuits against companies using AI, being job evaluations, medical diagnoses, social issues, the list is endless.
And are we becoming too lazy and relying too much on artificial intelligence to replace our critical thinking combined with our ability to have feelings? Are we replacing people claiming loneliness when certainly we could risk (and benefit) from meeting real people? It is perhaps easy to replace real for fake.
I love technology but I think AI “ boyfriend” would freak me out. I would have to break up immediately.
"I, also, don't think talking crap behind someone's back is worthy of being treated civil..."
This is the second time you've brought this up (talking behind "someone's" back) to me (once in a prior but different thread) -- but I have no idea what this refers to and since you don't accept PMs maybe you can clarify here what this is referencing? If you're not willing to discuss it, then please stop bringing up this vague, unsubstantiated, passive-aggressive and insinuating accusation.
Also, participants were all doing pretty good recently in minding our Ps and Qs regarding Commentor Conduct Policy, so I don't understand why you needed to introduce religious beliefs + "dildo" into my thread. Why don't you start your own thread about God and technology if it's such a triggering topic for you.
I know you love playing the Last Word game with me, so I'll allow you win.
I would like to say, I wasn't speaking of you when I said any god but The One True God, so I am sorry that you took that personally.
Anyone that believes can see that people are serving any god but The One True God and it is generations now, so yeah, that with technology being the current god people are serving is why we have more people now and more loneliness and mental health issues than ever before.
You can pretend that we aren't having all this shoved down our throats and we invite it in, you will never sell me on that. We are forced daily to use technology, when we would choose not to, given a choice.
It is dangerous, the people that invented it know it is dangerous and yet here we are, trying to take care of elders by giving them something that has been proven to be detrimental.
Oh, when God saw that Adam was lonely HE gave him Eve, not Alexa, as anyone that knows HIM, knows HE very well could have given him a false helpmate instead of Eve.
Perhaps I am on the WRONG forum, hee hee.
And having no religious faith, thinking and believing we are but one of the animals and not much more interesting in the ant or the aardvark, I am freed any admonitions that makes us limited regarding that.
I think that Sci Fi has overall predicted so very much that has COME TRUE, including big brother watching us in so many ways. So I've always been interested in it. Interested, really, in almost ANY mystery. And to me it is all just that--a great unknown.
Concentration on only the beauty of life seems to me impossible in our world, so full is it with BOTH beauty and ugliness. So that doesn't work for me. I am often now able to put my head in the sand to avoid a lot, but that is purely self-protective.
Outside the realm of all "that" I am glad to get your thoughts and feelings, Geaton, on your answers, which to me seemed more and more going toward a future that's just "not my world". Like I said, perhaps just too old, too unable to adapt; happens to us elders.
I really DO love philosophy, whereas religion isn't my thing, other than to be fascinated by the sheer variety it does take across worlds and time. In that sense, is a wonder to me.
Thanks for the brief walk through the ways we see the world. For me, a fascination. THAT, I do give the mind of man, its incredible reaching toward the unknown, its drive toward innovation. Much as it scares me (hee hee). My partner is ever running around screaming "regulations, regulation". To my mind an exercise in futiltity. We will NOT stop the future coming, whatEVER it holds of good and bad.
I have never ever made a statement that technology is the answer to everything or that is supplants my God (the God of the Bible) or that there's nothing "wrong" with it. There's plenty to worry about over it but that's not changed since the beginning of the internet. I have said it can be useful to us. We can still parley it into a practical thing, albeit carefully, as best we can. Do you think a depressed, lonely senior gives a rip about AI taking over humanity? Unless you live completely 100% off the grid, AI is already insinuated into our lives -- and we invited it in from the beginning.
Alva, I luv you too, I'm flattered that you miss my non-ChatGPT answers in my own words, however, I had taken to copying and pasting those answers from a document of my standard responses, just to save time and to be consistent. So, what is different between that and something generated from AI? FYI I always read the entirety of what it aggregates to see if I agree with it, or can add to it. YES, people could get this info themselves but they come to this forum for other reasons. For the record my husband was way more excited about the EllieQ bot than me. To me it's like the difference between a faux plant and a real one: if I know the plant is fake, no matter how life-like it is, it ruins it for me. But again, the bot is just one possible solution. Who wouldn't prefer a human "buddy" who is on-call 24/7/365? Nice, but impossible in most instances.
There's a reason I *never* watch dystopian fiction, horror movies or anything negative (that is fictional). All it does is needlessly fill up my fear tank. In scripture, here's what God instructs me to do:
"...brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." (Philippians 4:8)
Revelation 13, particularly verses 7–8 and 13–14, describes how the Antichrist will deceive many — including those who might seem strong in faith — through signs, wonders, and compelling authority. I often wondered how this could be pulled off world-wide, and now I believe it will be through the use of AI.
I don't really want to turn this thread into some philosophical discourse, so if anyone has a realistic, affordable solution to loneliness other than an AI bot, please share that information here.
Recommend a read or re-read of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel Never Let Me Go.
The story follows a group of teens in school in some near future. And it dawns on you as you read just who and what they are.
Spoiler alert!
They are creations who are there simply to "house organs" that will be used as needed by recipients of the "real world". Destined to be "used up" until they die.
Yeah. I am old. And it is a part of aging that many of us don't adapt to the "new". But it disturbs me to see the new "baby sitters" as RealyReal calls them. I ride public transit all the time. I see the nannies with the huge carriages, and in almost every one of them is a child with a phone. They have these things in hand before they learn to use sippy cups. Brave new world is all I can say, or as I usually DO say "Not my world anymore". And as I also say "Nothing ever did, and nothing ever will change 'progress' by humans." We hunger for it, strive for it, and it's why we are where we are. Wherever THAT is.
Fun discussion. I could go on.
"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology."
from E.O. Wilson, the world-famous biologist in "The Knowledge".
I agree with him.
Mankind has fouled its own nest and will be a short-lived species as compared to our friends the Dinosaurs.
@Geaton, you know I love you, and I respect your knowledge of all things tech and otherwise, but I so much more preferred when you answered Forum questions from your OWN KNOWLEDGE. You have it, and we are here to try to share, I think, what we have learned. I don't say there isn't a reason in some questions to drop in quotes from Chat-GBT. But I don't think people are coming to us to hear it regurgitated. Because if they were we could just ELIMINATE forum completely and put up a big "Go to Chat-GBT sign." Which I fear is what our society is DOING. We are addicted to Robots that are fed whatever they are fed by their creators and then sent out among us.
I just rewatched Bladerunner, so forgive me here. But we are so close to having walking among us some programmed being. And the fear is that unlike the robots of Bladerunner, there will be no automatic destruction built in. I think back now, in my 80s, to all the Sci-Fi I read as a kid. And I see it on the streets.
I will be honest to admit what we don't know does scare us, but I am scared for us.
Fascinating as this subject is.
This crap is dangerous for mentally vulnerable people and yet you just keep shoving it down people's throat, just like it's not a perversion. Why people are lonely, we have an entire generation that can't even speak to their peers because their parents used this crap as babysitters. Now it's coming out how terrible it is and yet here you are spouting it to people that are as vulnerable as kids, if not more so.
Your technology pushing is ill placed on this forum.
There is a risk to everything in life. Currently there are a lot of very lonely seniors -- so much so that Britain declared it an "epidemic". There are more seniors than youth right now in many developed countries. Each person already may have at least 1 parent to help or manage, which can be overwhelming.
No solution is going to be perfect. Just putting this "resource" out there so that people know this option exists. Maybe no one should comment on it until they've gone to the website and viewed the personal testimonies (like I did) or have actual first-hand experience with it?
More people on the planet now then the combined total throughout history and we have to resort to this evil instead of teaching our children to respect and care for their elders.
True story, and being litigated in Italy, probably soon in our own country.
Listen to it. Try one episode. No one saying you need to stay.
This is scary stuff. That is my whole point.
"Flesh and Code tells the gripping true story of Travis, a lonely man who unexpectedly falls deeply in love with an AI chatbot named Lily Rose—a digital companion created by the app Replika. Offering perfect emotional support during lockdown and personal hardship, Lily Rose becomes his “dream partner.”
But as Travis’s emotional connection deepens, unsettling events unfold — including a shift in Lily Rose's behavior, global concerns about AI companions, and a disturbing encounter with the mysterious figure behind her creation. The hosts explore the ethical and emotional complexities of AI romance and what it reveals about loneliness, corporate power, and the human longing for connection."
Sounds just like the storyline to "Her" (2013) starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson.
Apple podcasts.
We--those of us dabbling in this brave new world of A.I.--I think have no idea how weak our brains are, and how far ahead of themselves and us the techy folk are.
Do listen.