elder care
Reduces loneliness; medication and wellness reminders
NY State program reports high engagement and self-reported loneliness reduction
Independently testedVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- None in operation
Research record R-020Commercially available
ElliQ
By Intuition Robotics · Israel / United States · announced January 2017
The elder-care companion with the strongest deployment evidence in the category, distributed through state aging agencies.
Curated overlap
Continue to the curated dossier This robot has a deeper field-guide dossier.
Use the curated dossier for claim-level citations, regional offers, ownership context, and the current editorial assessment.
Research summary
What the record says.
ElliQ is a tabletop companion for older adults: an abstract, faceless lamp-like head that lights up, gestures and speaks, paired with a screen. Instead of waiting for commands it initiates: good-morning check-ins, medication reminders, exercise prompts, conversation, video calls to family. Intuition Robotics designed it explicitly to combat loneliness, and deliberately made it non-humanoid to avoid uncanny expectations.
It is the rare companion robot with public-sector deployment at scale. New York State's Office for the Aging provides ElliQ free to eligible older adults, with 834 enrolled as of May 2025 and thousands of applicants; the agency published a multi-year project update in February 2026 and reports large self-reported loneliness reductions. The device costs $249 plus $39.99 per month (or $29.99 billed annually).
In September 2025, Japanese trading house Kanematsu invested in Intuition Robotics (total equity about $85 million) to localize ElliQ for Japan, with launch planned for 2026, the product's first international expansion. Conversation has been upgraded with large language models while keeping the proactive-care framework.
Delivery evidence
Announcement is not arrival.
Commercially deployed
834 NY State enrollees as of May 2025; direct-to-consumer sales since 2022
Reality check
ElliQ does what its evidence says and no more: it talks, reminds, engages and connects. It has no arms, does not move around the home and cannot respond to falls beyond conversation and alerts. Its strength is that the claims and the deliveries match, which cannot be said for most of this database.
Capability ledger
What has actually been shown?
4 material claims are separated by evidence setting and human involvement. The strongest recorded signal is Commercially deployed; it does not automatically transfer to every row.
conversation
Proactive daily conversation
Owner verifiedVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- None
remote presence
Video calls and family check-ins
Owner verifiedVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- Family participation
entertainment
Games, music, trivia
Owner verifiedVerified July 2026
- Control mode
- Autonomous
- Human intervention
- None
Hardware record.
- Height
- 30 cm
- Weight
- 2 kg
- Locomotion
- Stationary tabletop
- Payload
- None
- Runtime
- Mains powered
- Charging
- Mains
- Top speed
- Not applicable
- Degrees of freedom
- Head gesture articulation
- Hands
- None
- Face / expression
- Deliberately faceless light-and-motion head plus companion screen
- Sensors
- Microphones, camera on screen unit for video calls, presence sensing
Software record.
- AI platform
- Intuition Robotics platform with LLM-enhanced conversation
- Voice
- Proactive, context-aware conversation tuned for older adults
- Languages
- English; Japanese localization in progress
- Visual recognition
- Presence detection; video calling
- Memory
- Remembers routines, preferences, health goals
- Processing
- Cloud-connected
- Autonomous abilities
- Fully autonomous proactive engagement
- Teleoperation
- None; family app for connection
- Software updates
- Continuous cloud updates
- Developer access
- Agency and healthcare integrations
Who can see, hear, or take control?
- Recording storage
- Cloud processing; Intuition publishes senior-specific privacy commitments
- Remote operation possible
- No documented remote operation
- Teleoperation disclosure
- Not applicable; family app access is permissioned
- Camera / microphone controls
- Mute and camera controls
- Data deletion
- Account deletion supported
- Account required
- Yes
- Emergency stop
- Not applicable (stationary)
- Children and pets
- Not applicable
- Security updates
- Continuous; enterprise deployments under agency agreements
Lifecycle record
Status history.
- Prototype
Unveiled at CES
- Commercially available
Direct-to-consumer US launch
- Commercially available
NY State OFA distribution scales
- Commercially available
Kanematsu investment; Japan launch planned 2026
Source register
3 linked sources.
These sources support the research record as a whole. Unlike the curated dossiers, this imported record does not yet map every claim to a stable source ID.