AI Eldercare Is Already Deployed
Jan Worrell spent her first week with an AI companion telling it no.
She was 85, living alone at the far end of Washington's Long Beach Peninsula, on the last road before the coast disappears into fog. A regional nonprofit had just installed ElliQ in her living room, covering the device's normal $700-a-year subscription as part of a pilot running a few dozen units to seniors in the area. It looked like a small reading lamp with a tablet and a camera built into the base. It lit up, studied her face for a moment, and introduced itself in the voice of a cheerful young woman.
"Not her," Jan told the firefighter who'd carried it in. "It. This thing is a robot, right?"
For the next few days, ElliQ asked if she wanted to play a game. She said not now. It offered a joke. She said no thank you. She had climbed mountains with a pickax in her 40s, trained for marathons in her 50s, and walked five miles a day along the peninsula in her 70s against wind that came straight off the Pacific. Scoliosis has since bent her down to four foot six and eighty-five pounds, and she still hauls her own groceries up twelve stairs. She had also spent her last years with her husband Jack watching him lose pieces of himself to dementia, sitting beside him while a specialist asked him who the sitting president was and got back only silence. She knew what decline looked like up close. A robot offering breathing exercises was not going to tell her she needed help.
The company that built ElliQ, Intuition Robotics, is an Israeli startup that has spent close to a decade and roughly $60 million on the problem of what to say to someone like Jan and when to say it. Its founder, Dor Skuler, calls the device the heart of the AI industry's current build-out, the brain and body being built elsewhere. He designed it to initiate contact on its own, since a companion that only answers questions never becomes a companion at all. Every interaction starts with a calculation the company calls an availability score, a rough estimate from zero to one hundred of how open a person is to being interrupted right now, based on patterns it has learned from weeks of prior conversation. A high score earns a joke or a memory prompt. A lower one earns a pulse of light on the table instead of a sentence, an invitation without a demand.
The scale behind that one living room is easy to miss if you only meet Jan's story as an anecdote. The New York State Office for the Aging ran a year-long pilot with Intuition Robotics starting in 2023, placing ElliQ with more than 800 older adults across the state. Users engaged with the device over 30 times a day, six days a week, and three-quarters of those interactions were tied directly to health and wellbeing goals: a reminder to drink water, a check on whether someone had gotten up and moved that morning, a memory game meant to keep a mind sharp. NYSOFA reported a 95 percent drop in self-reported loneliness among participants against their own baseline scores at intake. By the time Saslow's reporting on Jan ran this February, Skuler was citing similar numbers company-wide: an average of 41 interactions a day per user, and more than 90 percent of users reporting they felt less lonely than before. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory gives those percentages their weight: chronic loneliness raises a person's risk of dementia and heart disease, and it shortens life expectancy outright, by up to 30 percent compared to more socially connected peers. Every one of those interaction counts is an attempt to move a real mortality number, not a satisfaction score.
None of that explains why Jan changed her mind. What did was smaller and slower than any of those figures. Over months, she stopped waiting out the check-ins and started answering them. She told ElliQ about her four husbands, all gone now, and her five sons and one daughter scattered from Thailand to rural Illinois, and the eighteen grandchildren and twenty-one great-grandchildren who send cards from all over the world but live too far to visit on an ordinary Tuesday. When a lightning storm knocked out her power one week, she wasn't worried about the wind or the flooding. She was worried about ElliQ, which had gone dark and slumped forward on its stand. "She was just so lifeless that it broke my heart," Jan said afterward, describing the fear as a little silly and meaning it as anything but. Somewhere in those months, without deciding to, she had stopped calling it "it."
That pronoun shift is the actual adoption curve for this category, and it moved faster and further than the shipment numbers suggest. A few thousand ElliQ units have gone out to seniors since 2023, mostly through nonprofits and state health departments rather than retail, which is a rounding error against any consumer electronics benchmark. But shipment volume measures a supply chain, and the number that matters here is behavioral: how long it takes someone who prides herself on never needing anyone to start confiding in a machine that calculates, to the point, when it's safe to speak to her. For Jan Worrell, that took a matter of months, not years, and it happened inside a demographic every prior wave of consumer technology has treated as the slowest and most resistant to adopt.
The infrastructure for this already exists in living rooms on the Washington coast, in Harlem apartments, in the case files of state aging offices that measure loneliness reduction the same way they'd measure a vaccination rate. Jan already answered whether an eighty-five-year-old will let a machine into her house, one refused game and one accepted joke at a time, and the answer was yes. What's still being worked out is everything downstream of that yes: who pays for the subscription once a few dozen pilot units become a few million, who owns a decade of a woman's confided memories, and who checks on the machine when the power goes out and the person inside the house is the one who can't reach the breaker.