This Robot Will Keep Your Grandparents Company When You’re Too Busy
ElliQ will tell an older adult to take their medicine, or go for a walk, or call their loved ones.
“The aging process brings social and emotional changes, and also loss into people’s lives,” says Keren Etkin. But the gerontologist, a lead researcher hired as employee number one at Intuition Robotics, believes that artificial intelligence can ease these transitions for our elders.
And there are many of them. As life expectancy hovers around 79 years, the number of individuals age 65 and older in the U.S. alone is projected to more than double from 46 million today to over 98 million by 2060, according to the Population Reference Bureau. The facilities to care for them are also proliferating.
According to the National Institute on Aging (as of 2015) there are about 4.7 million senior citizens using home-health care; 730,000 in assisted living facilities, and 1.4 million in nursing homes. The majority of seniors say they would like to see more services available to help them adapt their homes for their developing needs.
Enter ElliQ–a robot that’s still currently in development (and scheduled to launch later this year) and is aimed to tackle those…
