Companion Robot, ElliQ, to Support Primary Care Providers in Caring for Older Adults at Home

BOSTON, MA, June 30, 2021 -- Intuition Robotics, the empathetic digital companion™ company, announced today a significant expansion of ElliQ, their AI-driven companion robot, to enable the extension of primary care teams’ presence into older adults’ homes. This will help increase patient engagement and improve the overall patient experience, while offering primary care providers continuous actionable data and insights for early detection and intervention. Intuition Robotics also announced a pilot with Family Doctors, a Mass General Brigham affiliated practice in Swampscott, MA.

Primary care providers encounter two major challenges in engaging older adult patients that ElliQ aspires to address. The first is lack of visibility on the accurate state of their patient in between touchpoints. Leading primary care providers have ~1 touchpoint a month with each patient, but most have less than ~1 touchpoint a year, meaning that the day-to-day changes in older adults’ clinical conditions are largely unknown. The second challenge is consistent and timely communication and engagement with patients. The combination of early detection when changes in clinical conditions occur, along with effective communication that strengthen the doctor-patient relationship, can increase the quality of care and help reduce avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations.  

ElliQ is the first-ever empathetic digital companion robot designed to help curb loneliness and social isolation among older adults. ElliQ is a proactive goal-based system that was developed with years of research and user studies combining psychology, behavioral sciences, and advanced cognitive AI capabilities. The companion robot has spent over 30,000 days in older adults’ homes over the past two years, and on average each older adult completed ~150 successful goal-oriented interactions with ElliQ per month. ElliQ engages older adults, connects to family, promotes wellness and helps older adults stay sharp.

The company’s extensive experience demonstrated that older adults form meaningful bonds with ElliQ, treating ElliQ as less of a technological device, and more like a  friendly roommate who provides a source of comfort and companionship. ElliQ projects empathy to deliver engagement, trust, and collaboration between the agent and the older adult, while offering unprecedented levels of engagement that affect behavior change.

COVID-19 not only increased the isolation and loneliness of many seniors, it also heightened the recognition of the importance of bringing healthcare into the older adult’s home.

Now, with new capabilities designed for healthcare, ElliQ is in a unique position to help providers improve quality of care by creating a direct channel of communication between providers and patients. ElliQ proactively engages the patient in conversations and activities throughout the day, collects self-reported data, and, with the patient’s consent, shares data with the primary care team. Primary care providers can adjust the type and frequency of self-reported data that ElliQ collects on a per patient basis, as well as communicate with patients seamlessly through the robot. These capabilities allow patients to ask their doctors questions, assume greater control of their condition and treatment, enjoy peace of mind, and receive higher quality of care. Ultimately, by increasing communication and engagement within the home, ElliQ helps strengthen the relationship between doctors and patients.

As part of Intuition Robotics’ move into healthcare, the company recently hired Dr. Michael Cantor as their first Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Cantor is a geriatrician with extensive experience in managing population health for provider organizations and payers. In his last role he served as the CMO of Bright Health, a medicare advantage payer. In addition, Intuition Robotics announced that the company is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA is the primary U.S. regulation governing the security and privacy of personal health information used by health insurance plans and other covered entities.

“ElliQ has proven to be an invaluable resource for our older adult users, who often choose to share something personal with the companion robot on a daily basis. While our original focus for ElliQ was to promote independent living and aging in place by combating isolation and loneliness, we realized that they were mere components of the bigger picture: helping to holistically improve care for older adults,” said Dor Skuler, CEO and Co-Founder of Intuition Robotics. “Working with healthcare professionals over the last year, we now see that ElliQ has the potential to support the full spectrum of care, physically, mentally, and socially.”

“ElliQ is already a great resource for older adults to maintain a healthy and engaged lifestyle at home, providing them with much-needed companionship, entertainment, cognitive stimulation, and health and wellness suggestions,” said Dr. Peter Barker of Family Doctors. “The new capabilities provide physicians with visibility into the patient's condition at home while allowing seamless communication are every doctor’s dream, as it can assist me and my team in early detection and mitigation of health issues, and it increases patients’ involvement in their care through more frequent engagement and communication.”

Intuition Robotics is planning on expanding its partnership with additional value-based care physician groups, primary care providers, and health plans who serve older adults in the United States. Once data emerges from these pilots, the company plans to begin offering ElliQ widely to the healthcare ecosystem.  

About Intuition Robotics
Intuition Robotics creates empathetic digital companions™ that positively impact people's lives. Using their proprietary cognitive AI technology, as well as unique knowhow, their digital companions establish long-term relationships between people and technology, unlocking unprecedented engagement levels. The company’s goal is to use this breakthrough technology to help people live better, starting with older adults. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Israel with offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Greece. Intuition Robotics' investors include: Toyota Ventures, Samsung NEXT, iRobot, and Venture Capital firms from California, Israel, Japan, and China. The company's first product, ElliQ®, is an award-winning proactive social robot for older adults. ElliQ is aimed at keeping older adults healthy, active, and independent at home, bridging the gap between them and their healthcare providers. ElliQ won the New Product and Technology Awards Aging Award 2020, AI Breakthrough Award (2020 and 2018), CES Best of Innovation Award 2018, and more.

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Renee Rossi
Si14 Global Communications

renee.rossi@si14global.com