ElliQ, an AI-Driven Social Robot to Alleviate Loneliness: Progress and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Background Loneliness is a significant issue in older adults and can increase the risk of morbidity and mortality. Objective To present the development of ElliQ, a proactive, AI-driven social robot with multiple social and health coaching functions specifically designed to address loneliness and support older people. Development/Implementation ElliQ, a consumer robot with a friendly appearance, uses voice, sounds, light, and buttons through a touch screen to facilitate conversation, music, video calls, well-being assessments, stress reduction, cognitive games, and health reminders. The robot was deployed by 15 government agencies in the USA. Initial experience suggests it is not only highly engaging for older people but may be able to improve their quality of life and reduce loneliness. In addition, the development of a weekly report that patients can share with their clinicians to allow better integration into routine care is described. Conclusion This paper describes the development and real-world implementation of this product innovation and discusses challenges encountered and future directions.

Recommendations for designing conversational companion robots with older adults through foundation models

“…These follow-up questions can be used to investigate the underlying aspects of the matters concerning the user’s loneliness, to increase their awareness of the root cause, and correspondingly address the problem. If, for instance, the cause is the lack of contact with family and friends, the user can be encouraged to reach out to them, similar to the ElliQ robot ( Broadbent et al, 2024 ). While it is challenging to pinpoint the LLMs into certain directions, such use cases (e.g., loneliness, negative thoughts) for older adults can be pre-set in the system, in addition to topic detection via LLMs ( Cahyawijaya et al, 2023 ) or other traditional methods ( Ibrahim et al, 2018 ).…”

“…To investigate the association between open-domain dialogue with a conversational companion robot and experiences of loneliness in later life, future studies should explore older adults’ experiences with conversational companion robots outside the laboratory environment with a scale for measuring subjective perception of loneliness before and after interacting with the robot over time, such as UCLA Loneliness Scale ( Russell, 1996 ) or Companion Robot Impact Scale ( Broadbent et al, 2024 ). Loneliness and social isolation should be recognized as phenomena related to social and personal relationships and connectedness with the community, networks, and society.…”

“…It learns from user interactions to personalize its suggestions. However, it is unclear how this learning occurs due to proprietary software, which is updated every 3–4 weeks ( Broadbent et al, 2024 ). The robot was deployed to older adults across 15 programs from various healthcare organizations in the US and Canada since its release in 2022.…”

“…A study with 173 users who used the robot over 30 days showed that 80% agreed to feel less lonely with the robot. However, despite the effectiveness of proactivity in addressing loneliness ( Ring et al, 2013 ), some users were surprised or annoyed by the proactive features ( Broadbent et al, 2024 ). Other studies supported the negative perceptions of proactive features of the robot, such as being perceived to be talking a lot, threatening their independence, lacking compassion, and being rude, invasive, intrusive, or patronizing ( Deutsch et al, 2019 ; Coghlan et al, 2021 ).…”