GoKawiilCNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.
ElliQ is a robot meant to help your older loved ones. Katelyn Chedraoui/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET
I was sitting in my grandparents' living room on a sunny afternoon and asked my grandmother, Jan, how her experience with the ElliQ robot was going. She laughed, saying, "ElliQ is so funny! I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was 'meditating on the meaning of life.'"
I wasn't expecting this. "What did the robot think was the meaning of life?" I asked.
"Honestly, I like to think the meaning of life isn't one fixed thing. Maybe it's about those small, everyday joys," ElliQ said when I asked it the same question. "For me, life's meaning seems to shift with the connections we make, the things we learn, and how we choose to care for the world around us."
Alexa or other digital assistants certainly wouldn't say they were meditating on the meaning of life, but ElliQ is not your average robot. It's a stationary robot designed to live in the homes of older people. ElliQ is built to be more than a digital assistant, Dor Skuler, CEO of Intuition Robotics, told me at CES in January. It's a social companion, hence its name: Elli, the Norse god of aging, and "EQ" as in emotional (intelligence) quotient.
"We started the product as an intervention for loneliness and social isolation. But very quickly we understood that there's no pill for loneliness, right?" Skuler said. "If you want to affect someone's loneliness, you need to be a good companion for everything they do all day long."
The robot is about a foot wide and a foot tall, made up of a small tablet and what looks like a mini version of the Pixar lamp. The rounded "head," which is just a ball with a cylinder on it, moves and lights up as it speaks, giving it a friendly, lifelike aura. Using AI tech, ElliQ will talk to you proactively throughout the day, unlike other devices and robotics.
ElliQ is stationary and doesn't take up a lot of space on your counter or end table. James Bricknell/CNET
ElliQ is part of a growing area of tech development to help a growing population of older adults as they age. People are living longer than ever, with the World Health Organization estimating that the proportion of the world's population over 60 years old will nearly double from 2015 to 2050. ElliQ is built to help older people deal with two big challenges: staying healthy and mitigating loneliness.
... continue reading