Robotics for accompaniment

Almost since the origins of robotics, the creation of robots as tools for human accompaniment has been proposed and this has resulted in different prototypes that have even been commercialized, such as Jibo. This small android, with the appearance of a sophisticated megaphone, helps families to take care of their elders, with a cost of around 50 euros per month.

What happens when families and their older members are far away, or younger ones can’t spend as much time as they would like or should with older ones?

In 2015 the company was born Intuition Robotics, which focuses on paliar a specific problem of very long-lived people that is not talked about much:  loneliness and social isolation, something that  affects between 40% and 60% of this population segment.

The company is developing a “companion for active aging” called ElliQ, securing $20 million in funding in a first round. The company is working on a new concept that sees aging as something to celebrate rather than focusing on disabilities, according to Dor Skuler, FTF expert and CEO and co-creator of Intuition Robotics.

To alleviate the loneliness of older people -which has a direct impact not only on their quality of life, but also on their health-, two factors very implanted in today’s society must be modified:

– the digital divide and
– the tendency of older people to repeat the same routine and be reluctant to incorporate modifications.

The social robot ElliQ remuners its owners to take their medication, manages transportation, notifies them of their appointments not only face-to-face but telephone e even suggests joint recreational activities, such as online games. In the CES 2019, ElliQ was presented as a finished product and advance orders began to be accepted. Its price is around € 1,400, to which we will have to add a monthly fee “assumable”.

Contrary to what happens with other digital assistants such as Alexa, managing ElliQ does not require specific skills; it is also a proactive system, based on an artificial intelligence that tries to understand the world around it and adapt to objectives previously introduced by the elderly person it accompanies.

In February 2020, Intuition Robotics announced that it has secured other $36 million in funding for its projects.  These types of investments, together with the holding of specialist conferences such as the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), whose last and eleventh edition was held in Madrid between November 26 and 29, 2019, are signs that accompanying robotics still has a lot to say.

En el anuncio de la financiación que acaba de hacer Intuition Robotics, Dor Skuler explica en TechCrunch que la compañía ha pasado los últimos dos años recopilando datos a través de ElliQ. En el proceso, la compañía pasó más de 10

In the announcement of funding just made by Intuition Robotics, Dor Skuler explains in TechCrunch that the company has spent the last two years collecting data through ElliQ. In the process, the company spent more than 10,000 days in the homes of early adopters to collect data. The youngest of those users was 78 years old and the oldest 97