ElliQ – companion for seniors
Israel-based startup Intuition Robotics is Beta-testing its device in the US and running online this ad:
ElliQ, the new home robot – Companion robot for seniors
Proactive care companion available for free to eligible older adults. ElliQ Care Program offering Free devices to eligible seniors. Explore Features. Browse Blog.
Intuition Robotics
Intuition Robotics is a privately held company backed by venture capital. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Israel with offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Greece. In 2016 the company secured the first $2M in funding.
In January 2017, the company introduced its ElliQ – “emotionally intelligent digital companion that’s designed to tackle loneliness among older people” – at the “New Design for Old” exhibition of the London’s Design Museum in Kensington. Same year company secures another $14M and the next year it started testing ElliQ in older adults’ homes in the US. In 2020, just before the pandemic started, the company secured $36M in funding and launched a free program across the US to support older adults and expand ElliQ’s presence into their homes.
In 2020, Intuition Robotics announced that it is working with Toyota Research Institute on incorporating its Q Technology (based on ElliQ) into the new empathetic AI cloud-connected agent called Yui for the Toyota LG concept car.
In 2021, ElliQ expanded into the healthcare space to support older adults aging in place while engaging care teams to deliver better care to their aging patients.
As of 2021, the company employs 97 people, 90% of company employees are engineers creating content, machine learning algorithms, full stack developers, operational people, data people, product managers.
ElliQ Awards:
- CES Best of Innovation Award 2018
- Gold Award for Personal Robotics in the 2020 Aging Awards
- The 2018 AI Breakthrough Award
- The 2020 AI Breakthrough Award (Cognitive Robotics Innovation Award)
- Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe
- Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2020 (Middle East category)
- Qumra Capital’s 10 Most Promising Israeli Startups
Investors: SPARX Group, Toyota AI Ventures, Sompo Holdings, iRobot, Samsung NEXT, OurCrowd, Terra Venture Partners, Union Tech Ventures, Maniv Mobility, Happiness Capital, Glory Ventures, Capital Point, Bloomberg Beta.
ElliQ Companion
Features – EllieQ proactively engages and guides its host through a variety of activities including:
Concept – ElliQ is an interactive smart speaker designed for older adults. As a digital companion, it initiates interaction, suggests ideas and works with the human to help achieve specific goals and behavior or emotional changes of its host. It is empathetic and proactive. Other smart speakers like Alexa and Google Assistant are responding to the voice commands and serve as digital assistants to help get certain things done.
Dor Skuler, CEO and Co-Founder of Intuition Robotics, said
Our cognitive AI technology has the potential to transform the way people and machines interact through empathetic relationships built on trust, exhibiting highly personalized and delightful experiences that amplify our customers’ brands.
ElliQ AI agent is different from any general agent trained for pattern recognition and judged by its productivity and efficiency. ElliQ creates a narrow and specific proactive agent with a unique persona and goals to achieve behavior or emotional changes of its host.
The agent becomes personalized using reinforcement learning and creating a user model, consisting of memory cells populated with user responses, routines and preferences of the user. There is a very wide library of different interaction types and different agents choose different things from that library based on each one’s personalization.
The agent has a degree of freedom of choice around the pre-created content of the daily targets. When deciding if it is a good time to create an interaction, the agent needs to understand the context of the situation: what is going on in the world around me, who is in front of me, how long he/she has been in front of me, what he/she has done today, what is the weather outside, etc.
From different available plans (skills), the agent needs to decide which one has higher priority at this moment at this stage and which content version to choose, for example, which voice expression should it choose from the library (there are 130 preprogrammed versions to say “good morning”).
The agent is required to understand the state, understand the user, and the goals it tries to achieve and translate those into action.
Hardware – Dor Skuler describes ElliQ as a tabletop device, with a microphone, speaker, and cameras for computer vision. The design looks like a lamp, inspired by the Pixar lamp, with 3 degrees of freedom. It can pin up and down and tilt and has a LED matrix in front and at the top. The tablet screen is used for interactive displaying of visuals. When EliiQ decides to interact with you, it can look at you, and move to imitate body movements. It does not have a face, but it has light animation and moves for expression. Designers wanted to make clear that it is not a human but a device, its voice was intentionally made to sound more robotic, but it does not mean you can’t develop a relationship with this physical entity. ElliQ has a presence and it is always on.
For the caregivers and family members, which might want to access information about the loved one staying at home, there is a companion app to share pictures, send messages, do video conferencing.
Weight: 3.5 kg; dimensions: 8.5” x 5” x 0.5”; sound by Harman Speaker; Quad microphone array; three brushless motors; dual cameras; temperature sensor; LED arrays; requires high-speed Internet with wi-fi connection, AC power or electrical outlet.
Intuition Robotics Privacy statement – Intuition Robotics is fully HIPPA compliant, and we’ve implemented industry-leading security architecture and best practices to ensure that all data is safe and private. In order for ElliQ to be proactive, ElliQ has different embedded sensors. To protect each user and their privacy, ElliQ is the only one that has access to the information ElliQ collects. Anonymized metadata is used in order to personalize each user unique experience with ElliQ. We commit to never monetize personal data in any way.
Pilot Studies
In 2018, ElliQ was Beta tested by older adults ages 62-97 at their homes in Bay Area:
Each beta tester had ElliQ in their home for at least six months, allowing the company to study the product’s incorporation into the fabric of daily life.
In 2019, Our Beta Testing Journey article by the Intuition Robotics team described how beta testers’ feedback was used in adding new tasks and personal interactions for product refinement and tuning.
On Jan. 7, 2019, Intuition Robotic announced that
ElliQ is priced at $1,499. Early pre-order customers will enjoy a free year of premium subscription and support, including an in-home installation service. After the promotion period, subscriptions will cost $35-$50 per month, depending on the tier of service chosen by the customer.
The first ElliQ commercial units will be shipped to the Center for Aging + Brain Health Innovation (CABHI) led by Baycrest, an academic health sciences center. CABHI will conduct an in-depth research study with 100 older adults to test the extent to which ElliQ will decrease the feeling of loneliness and social isolation among older adults.
By 2020, ElliQ was in beta testing
for over 2 years in older adults’ homes across the U.S. and Canada, and ElliQ devices have collectively spent over 10,000 days living with users. Most beta program participants are between the ages of 62 and 97 (the overall average age is 81), have limited experience using technology, and exhibited high levels of loneliness
By 2021, ElliQ devices spent 30,000 days in older adults’ homes. To study the usability of the product, they installed cameras in the users’ homes to watch the interaction with ElliQ, observe the result of the interaction, view the body language of the user. There were 6-8 interactions per day, 60% were proactive, 1/3 interactions were small talk, 1/3 were entertainment, the rest were utilitarian functions.
ElliQ Care Program
At the initial stage of ElliQ development, the goal was to help seniors cope with loneliness and social isolation. Designers did not want users to feel as if he/she is spied on, so the intent was not to share how users acted or responded and discard any collected medical information.
It all changed when pandemic struck and sheltering in place at home became a new reality with online shopping, learning, and most importantly, obtaining health care. Telehealth and telemedicine became very important, especially for seniors.
On Nov. 9, 2021. Intuition Robotics announced the launch of its ElliQ Care Program in South Florida. ElliQ offers a direct channel of communication between the primary care provider and the patient:
Customizing ElliQ: The patient’s experience with ElliQ is fully customizable. ElliQ is configured with which questions to ask, how often, what to track and observe (e.g., pain levels, medication intake), and more.
Engagement with ElliQ: ElliQ proactively engages the patient in conversations and activities throughout the day and sends collected data directly to the primary care provider.
Actionable data and insights: Primary care providers gain insights on patients’ longitudinal observed and self-reported data and patterns. ElliQ will detect anomalies and notify the clinical team in real time.
Options for Patients & Primary Care Providers
Online Sources
- Intuition Robotics: Press, Intuition Robotics Raises $36M In Series B Funding, Feb. 19, 2020
- Voicebot Podcast Dor Skuler Co-Founder and CEO on Intuition Robotics, Ep 163 Aug, 16, 2020
- Youtube video: Interview with Dor Skuler, CEO of Intuition Robotics
- ElliQ Beta User’s Testimonials
- Intuition Robotics Launches ElliQ Care Program in South Florida
- ElliQ Care Program
- Youtube video: OurCrowd Summit 2020: Intuition Robotics Announces its Q Technology, Helping Power In-Car Agent, Yui