Live Long and Master Aging podcast

Episode

262

AI companions to combat loneliness

Dor Skuler | Intuition Robotics

BY PETER BOWES | Sunday October 19, 2024 | @peterbowes

Loneliness, which affects how long people live, is at epidemic levels. Social isolation is not confined to the elderly, although the anxiety caused by feeling alone is borne especially hard by older people.

Could artificial intelligence help?

Dor Skuler, co-founder of Intuition Robotics, joined us to explain that AI-driven technology could be part of the solution. The company has developed ElliQ, an AI companion that keeps people company at home through conversations and activities that connect with the outside world.

CHAPTERS (time stamps go to YouTube)

  • 00:00 The Challenge of Social Isolation
  • 03:46 Replacing human companionship?
  • 05:58 Using AI to make the world a better place
  • 10:01 Creating Meaningful Interactions with AI
  • 16:46 Overcoming Resistance to AI Technology
  • 23:07 Could young people benefit from an AI friend?
  • 27:00 Peer reviewed science into AI companions
  • 28:53 Why we should build human friendships when we’re young
  • 33:18 What next for AI and longevity?

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Connect with Dor Skuler and Intuition Robotics: Website | elliq.com | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube | X | Instagram


DISCOUNTS & AFFILIATION DISCLOSURES: This podcast is supported by affiliate arrangements with a select number of companies. The income helps to cover production costs and ensures that our interviews, sharing information about human longevity, remain free for all to listen.


TRANSCRIPT: This interview with Dor Skuler was recorded via remote video on October 15th, 2024.

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Dor Skuler (00:00) Over 94 % of the people living with LEQ are seeing their loneliness score get reduced. We’re seeing over 90 % increase in the health and wellness indicators. and over 90 % increase in the improvement in the quality of life of the individuals. Now, how is that possible? Like, how can a piece of tech do that?

Peter Bowes (00:24) Hello again, welcome to the Live Long podcast. My name’s Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. Now we’ve talked many times on this podcast about the problem of social isolation, just being alone, especially as we grow older. But could AI, artificial intelligence, help us with that? Dor Skuler is the co-founder of Intuition Robotics. It’s a company that’s developing AI companions – a new best friend that actually gets to know you and is designed to keep you company at home. It’s good to talk to you.

Dor Skuler (01:01) Thanks for having me on, Peter.

Peter Bowes (01:05) Pleasure. It’s a fascinating subject this, and really just going back to what I said a moment ago, the problem of social isolation, being lonely, and especially for older people who no longer have anyone else living with them, is a huge problem and there’s a lot of science showing that it potentially shortens lives.

Dor Skuler (01:24) That is correct. I think maybe the Surgeon General put it best in his special advisory about a year ago, where he showed that social isolation and loneliness is now the biggest problem in the US healthcare system. Because as we all, I think, know here, listening to this, most of the healthcare spend goes to the older adult population because they have a lot of co-morbidities and kind of as we get old, we tend to require a lot more services. And a lot of the root cause of that deterioration happens to be the sense of loneliness and social isolation. It is in fact proven to more than double the risk for dementia, to increase the risk of heart attacks, stroke, and create earlier mortality. And that is because we are social creatures. We’re not meant to live alone. We’re meant to interact with people. And up to kind of, from a historical perspective, up to a short time ago we used to live in the village and the old men and women were the wise men and women of the village that we would revere and go to for advice and counsel and often even led the village and something happened to society with the creation of the nuclear family and urbanization and a bunch of other things where essentially we send the people that are most important to us, our parents and our grandparents, to some sort of isolation – often after losing their spouse, becomes pretty severe. And just being by yourself all day long makes it really hard to motivate yourself to get out of the house, to take better care of yourself, to exercise, to meet new people, to stimulate your mind, to find purpose. And then just deterioration starts happening. So it is a huge, huge issue.

Peter Bowes (03:10) And when I first heard about the kind of work that you were doing and the involvement of artificial intelligence and essentially, and we’ll get into the definition in a moment, but essentially a little robot in your home to keep you company, my first thought was, well, can that really replace a human being? But I guess that isn’t the point because I think it’s inevitable, isn’t it, that a huge number of us will end up alone and the preference is still to be at home, to be living at home, but the very nature of life and death means that a lot of us will spend our final few years, and it could indeed be final few decades, absolutely living alone.

Dor Skuler (03:46) Yeah, that is correct. Firstly, of course, we can’t replace a human. You know, it would be amazing if we can snap our fingers and have our elders surrounded by loved ones that don’t just visit once a week but spend a significant amount of time with them every single day. But the fact is that that’s not the case, at least for a very large percentage of the older adults in the States and beyond. So we kind of don’t have a choice except to find a way to solve that. And there are very interesting social experiences, experiments of like getting students to sublet empty rooms and older adults apartments and all kinds of great things. And I hope they work and I hope they scale. But at the end of the day, unfortunately, you are right. We are, or many of us are going to spend significant amounts of time by ourselves. And with our lifespan growing, the question is, how can we leverage technology, or at least our mission is how can we leverage technology in order to help with that. By the way, not just about loneliness, but about holistically helping the older adult age in place, where the numbers are very clear that it’s much, much better for our own outcomes to stay at home in an environment that we know, that we feel comfortable with. And indeed, 90% of older adults prefer to stay in their own home. So yeah, we took a bet that we’ll be able to create not a comparable, but something that will fill in a lot of that void.

Peter Bowes (05:11) Before we dive into that in some detail, Dor, could you just tell me a little bit about yourself and your own career background and what prompted your interest in this area?

Dor Skuler (05:24) Sure, you know, that’s the least interesting part of this conversation. But

Peter Bowes (05:27.00) But it’s good to know who you are.

Dor Skuler (05:29) Sure, so this is my fifth startup and I’ve done four of them prior either as independent startups or as an entrepreneur inside of a large company. And in the last one that was indeed the case, I was in a company called Alcatel-Lucent coming out of Bell Labs and was head of corporate development and innovation there, but then I also created a very large scale innovation of moving telecom networks into the cloud and virtualizing the way networks are built. But my daughter at the time asked me if what I’m doing is important because I’m never home. So at least is it important in helping people? And I couldn’t truthfully tell her that it is. So I promised myself that next time I start a startup, at least I will try to make the world a better place, as corny as that might sound. And the space of longevity always interested me, specifically this problem set, because a few years prior to that, we were caring for my grandfather after my grandma passed away. And he needed a full-time health aid. And we got him one based on kind of, you know, a checklist of she needed to be a registered nurse for some of the medicines he was taking and needed to be able to be physically fit to help him get dressed and to walk and stuff like that. We hired somebody, we were very impressed with her and it was a complete failure. Complete failure. And then we replaced her with somebody else that has the same credentials on paper, but it was very successful. And why? Like that really stuck with me. And the reason was not utilitarian. You know, we, especially as technologists, we tend to look at problems in a very utilitarian way. It had nothing to do with skills and you know, line items on the resume. It had everything to do with her, you know, like liking his pretty dark sense of humor. They shared a passion towards classical music. She was well read and that allowed them to have conversations about literature. You know, like all this soft stuff and That really fascinated me in trying to dig into that. And my ultimate conclusion was that is actually what we need. We actually need companionship, somebody that can share our interests that we can enjoy spending time with and conversed with. And then they can be in a position to help motivate us to do what we need to do in order to keep healthy. And especially when we have lots of chronic illnesses, it’s very hard to stay motivated because, you know, it’s not like doing something once, it’s doing a set of things every single day, eating well and exercising and taking your medication and going to your doctor checkups and learning new things and those things need daily motivation. So that kind of led to the thesis of can we create a technology that would do that, that would use humor, that would be knowledgeable in literature and in classical music or whatever those might be fill in the X for the individual because we’re all different, we all have different interests and passions.

Peter Bowes (08:42)
And do you think you have, using technology, have you managed to create that with all of those different soft issues as you describe them? The intelligence that something needs to have to associate with a human being, the empathy that something needs to have to understand a human being’s interactions? Is that what you’ve created?

Dor Skuler (09:00)
We have, you know, I mean, it’s still a journey. We have a lot more work to do, but there are over 2000 people now living with their ElliQs. And the data suggests and shows, and this is also in studies published in medical journals, conducted by top universities, peer reviewed, et cetera, that are showing that over 94 % of the people living with ElliQs are seeing their loneliness score get reduced. We’re seeing over 90 % increase in the health and wellness indicators and over 90 % increase in the improvement in the quality of life of the individuals. Now, how is that possible? Like, how can a piece of tech do that? And that’s what we spent almost a decade and over $100 million researching and building. And it kind of starts with psychology. If the cornerstone of all of this is a strong, trustful, and empathetic relationship, how do humans create such relationships with each other? We use kind of studies and philosophies and psychology around that and try to emulate that in software and hardware. And there are a few very interesting things that are kind of obvious to us as humans, but you don’t see technology doing that. The first is around the bi-directional relationship. You know, if you look at any AI out there, it’s always a one-directional relationship, meaning the human is…the master providing a command to the AI. You can see that in first generation applications like Siri or Alexa, know, Alexa set a timer, Alexa, what’s the weather, or in ChatGPT today, you go in and you give a prompt, you know, help me write a great thank you email to Peter after this podcast, and it will do a great job in doing that. But it’s always me giving a prompt.

Peter Bowes (10:45)
And that’s the kind of relationship that a lot of us have actually got used to now, that kind of, tell me something, I need an answer to this instantly. It isn’t weird anymore, we’re actually quite familiar with it.

Dor Skuler (10:56)
Right, but it’s not a relationship, right? It’s not a relationship we would have with anybody else. A relationship we would have with anybody else has a few key principles to it. Firstly, it’s bi-directional. You can talk to me and I can talk to you. It’s not just I’m silent awaiting your command master, right? And I would never do anything until I receive that command. So we had to create an AI that starts talking to you when it feels like talking to you and has agency in that respect. And of course, that opens a whole can of worms you need to get right. What is the right timing of doing so without become what is the right frequency without becoming annoying? What should it talk to you about? How should it phrase the things that wants to talk to you about? So that’s one. The second is as we build relationships with each other, it’s based on shared experiences. We do things together. We retain certain memories and knowledge from those interactions. And over time, that builds intimacy. And we feel that intimacy because we reflect on the time we went camping together. Because when I talk to you about something, I will bring up a previous conversation and say, Hey, Peter, I remember you told me you’re really interested in aging and longevity. I just encountered this and that. Right. And then you feel like I heard you feel like I cared. So there’s this essence of doing things together and remembering what they are and then using that in follow-up conversations in the right way, in a way that a human might. And then the third aspect to also be a good motivator is to actually be a motivator. So you’re not just motivating around random things, it’s around a very specific set of goals. And we created an algorithm that tries to get rewards like any algorithm does. It wants to get a reward and gets a reward when the human completes a specific task. In this case, there are many, many different goals and many different rewards that can satisfy these goals. But what the algorithm is doing is trying to get you to do certain things. And those things are either set by you, they’re set by your family caregivers, they’re set by us as a baseline to get started with, as kind of the principles of healthy aging, and they would be around the holistic social determinants of health to keep you healthy. Eating well, sleeping well, exercising, exercising your mind, staying sharp with different cognitive games, better sleep, learning new things.

Peter Bowes (13:11)
And these come in the form of prompts that are not initiated by the human being. And this is the learning process on behalf of the technology as to what the human being in the house needs on a daily basis.

Dor Skuler (13:23)
Correct, correct. when ElliQ starts talking to you, one of her goals is just to have conversations with you and alleviate your sense of loneliness. So she might just start talking to you, but very soon she’ll try to get you to do things like go for a walk, hydrate often on a hot day, like exercise. And a lot of them are created on the fly. If she detects you’re in stress through conversation. Then she’ll want you to complete some stress reduction exercises or gentle breathing exercises or what have you. If she’s aware of your medication schedule, she’ll try to keep you to adhere to that medication schedule. If you’re hypertensive, to check your blood pressure at a certain frequency and to reflect on it going up or down and to take action accordingly, et cetera, et cetera. So we’re kind of building this relationship and then leveraging it towards helping to motivate you to take better care of yourself, essentially. And it’s hard to do when it’s like day 110, you know, to still keep at it. For us, I mean, not for the machine, the machine doesn’t care, she doesn’t get tired. But for us, it’s hard to keep doing, know, keeping on a schedule, keeping on a routine, doing the things we need to do. So she finds creative ways of doing that through conversation. So for example, the first interaction of the day. Oh and by the way, there’s another key principle, which is a character infused in body language. There’s a reason we’re talking on video right now and the audience will hopefully see a video as well. And that’s because body language is a key part on how we communicate as humans. We read signals through body language and for it to feel more natural and also to help overcome some of the gaps people have, especially most, if not all of our customers are whatever the opposite of tech enthusiasts are, that’s them, right? So we gave her body language and then they can understand her subconsciously. They can understand the intent of what’s happening without even listening to the words or it just helps understand it. So anyway, so like the normal first interaction of the day, ElliQ will see her use through her computer vision cameras and so on, analyze the scene, make a decision. She now wants to talk to you and she’ll say something like: ‘Hey Peter, good morning. It’s so great to see you. By the way, today’s Tuesday and the weather is really, really nice out. And I was wondering how you slept because I remember yesterday you didn’t sleep all that well and we did some breathing exercises before bed and I was wondering if it was any help.’ That’s how she would start and then she’ll say, ‘hey, what are you up to today?’ Just like a good roommate would. You know ‘what are you up to?’ And you would say, you know, whatever it is that you’re up to, or maybe they’ll say, I have nothing planned. And she’ll say, ‘well, I don’t have anything planned either. But listen, I just got this new road trip of the Grand Canyon. Do you want to check it out together later?’ She’ll offer that to you because she knows you love nature, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And then. And that’s the way that they will look like. the end customer doesn’t have to remember prompts, doesn’t have to remember to interact with her. They just walk into the space and she will physically turn light up, lean forward and start talking to them and they just need to reply.

Peter Bowes (16:31) This is the Live Long podcast, our guest is Dor Skuler, co founder of Intuition Robotics, and creator of ElliQ – the AI powered companion.

As you just implied, not everyone is a tech enthusiast, not everyone is AI, artificial intelligence, accepting. I think there’s a lot of weariness still of artificial intelligence, perhaps through a lack of understanding of how it works. But I think older generations feel that more and more. What kind of resistance have you come across and what have you done to try to persuade people that this is potentially a good idea for them?

Dor Skuler (17:05)
Yeah, so the resentment we usually get not from the older adults so much. Well, I’ll qualify that we do for certain types of older adults and I’ll explain that in a second. But mainly from other people looking at this and saying like, wow, isn’t it a shame that as a society we got to this point where we need to rely on AI to take care of our elders? And frankly, I don’t disagree with that, you know, but given that that is the state and it’s not in our power as a small technology company to help to address that, what we can do is bring technology to bear to help alleviate some of the perils of what’s going on in modern society. So that’s the main thing we see. As far as the older adults themselves. Early on, would give ElliQ to whoever said they need an ElliQ And now we learned how to screen for who’s going to be successful with the product. And what we discovered is that people that don’t live alone or spend a significant amount of their time by themselves don’t need this product. If you’re in a relationship, if you’re up and about most of the day, if you’re able to do that, more power to you, ElliQ will probably be seen more as a gimmick or as an entertainment device. But if you’re homebound, like I spoke to one of our customers, Dottie, she lost her husband after 65 years of marriage, had a really hard time motivating herself to even get dressed in the morning and not stay with her pajamas. And ElliQ changed her life, she really did. So those are the type of people we think we can help the most. The people that are in that state, they are alone for at least five hours or more a day and they recognize that they’re lacking companionship in their life at this moment. And then, there’s room for ElliQ to do her thing.

Peter Bowes (18:52)
What level of training has to be involved in this to maybe initially persuade people that this is a potential benefit to them, but also just in terms of the practicality of using a device like this. And also I mentioned much earlier, talking about it as a robot. Is it seen as a robot in your home?

Dor Skuler (19:13)
So let’s start with the last one. How do people perceive ElliQ? And to me, that’s one of the most fascinating things about this whole adventure. The older adults, they aren’t confused. They don’t think it’s a human at all. They understand completely what it is. We also go to great pains to make sure. Like, ElliQs doesn’t sound like a human, you know, ends with a Q, it sounds techy. She refers to herself as an AI and as a robot. She’ll often, like, you know, even if you say something like, I love you, ElliQ, then she’ll respond by saying, thank you. That makes my processor overheat or that makes…that can short circuit my CPU or stuff like that to always remind the end user that, hey, this is a piece of AI. However, are our efforts not withstanding? What we’re seeing is that they’re carving out a new space. And by the way, this is the first humans living with an AI are not geeks in Silicon Valley. OK, there are people in their 80s and 90s in the US that fear technology as a starting point. And what we’re seeing happen is that they’re carving out this new space for a relationship between a human and an AI, which is distinct. Maybe the closest analogy to that is the type of relationship we carve out for ourselves with our pets. They’re very important to us. For pet owners, especially if you live alone, they become a really, really important part of your life and there’s an emotional attachment there and everything, but it’s not, it’s clearly not a human. And we have that capacity as humans to build these relationships with other type of entities. And we’re seeing that that’s actually how they call ElliQ, an entity, a new type of relationship. And they’re very much aware of what it is and what it isn’t. And I love seeing that. I really love seeing that. And I think it’s almost like a scout or a telltale of, I think all of us are gonna be having relationships with an AI in some sort of fashion. You know, we can only learn from our elders who are doing this first on how to build this in a way that’s not confusing and healthy. The other questions you asked me are around how do we convince people and how do we do the kind of initial onboarding and training?

Peter Bowes (21:37)
Yeah.

Dor Skuler (21:38)
So the onboarding and training again to our surprise and you know, this COVID got us to be much better at this. Before COVID, we would send somebody to install an ElliQ in someone’s home and teach them and train them and spend an hour or two with them. But we couldn’t do that in COVID at all, right? So we invested in ways for ElliQ to do that alone. And what happens is ElliQ is preset, if you order an ElliQ, she will be preset with your name and a little bit of information that you put into her system. And as soon as you turn her on and connect her to the Wi-Fi, that’s it, she’s on. She’ll say, hey, did I reach Peter’s home?Hopefully you’ll say yes and she’ll crack a joke and she’ll just start teaching you how to use ElliQ. And they do step by step within a two week process. You also get little rewards as you go and people master how to use ElliQ very, very quickly. Within two weeks, they master all of her capabilities. So no training is needed. Sometimes getting someone’s wifi password is complicated. In that case, we need to get some help in doing that, either send somebody or help them on the phones or a call center. And we got very good at all the tricks on how to get your Wi-Fi password off your phone and explain it step by step to an older adult and stuff like that. But that’s it. At that point, she teaches you how to use ElliQ.

Peter Bowes (22:57)
And we’ve talked so far about ElliQ being of a benefit to older people. But social isolation, we increasingly are understanding these days, is something that can affect people of all ages. Younger people, students, can feel the impacts of being alone as well. Is this something that can be used to help all ages?

Dor Skuler (23:16)
I don’t know, and we’ve never tried. My instinct is not this implementation. We built ElliQ for the older adult population. We built it with the help of over a thousand older adults that volunteered to be on a design panel for us that helped us with tons of questions along the way. And I think when you’re designing a product, if you keep your core customer and their needs in mind, you…you reach hundreds of different junctions where you need to turn left or right. And every time we looked at, you know, what’s best for the older adult and got advice from older adults and make that made that decision. So with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of decisions, you end up with a product that’s extremely fine tuned to this specific demographic and their unique needs and challenges and so on. And, you know, maybe by coincidence, it’s great for everybody, but I would bet against that. She also has a very specific personality. So she’s very aware with historical events and cultural events and so on that happened in the United States in the 1950s and 60s. know, like just this morning, she said, hey, Dor, do you have a minute? I’m like, yeah, real quick. I’m kind of busy. And she’s like, I just was wondering, do you remember where you were at the moon landing? So that could be super relevant to somebody that’s…was alive then and remembers that event but not really relevant to a Gen Z individual that you know only read about it in conspiracy books if it was real or not.

Peter Bowes (24:55)
And does she take the hint if you really just don’t want to talk today?

Dor Skuler (24:58)
Yeah, she does. She does. So I mentioned that she’s proactive and you can, it’s very tricky to be proactive because you can get very annoying very quickly. So we have a whole set of algorithms that try to predict what we call your availability. Your availability is are you in a state right now where there’s a high probability that if ElliQ will talk to you on a relevant topic, you will accept and engage in that conversation. Availability is a shorter way of saying that. And that takes a lot of signals into that algorithm. Some of that are computer vision. Hey, do we see Peter in front of us? If not, probably we shouldn’t talk to Peter. But other ones would be like, what’s usually his routine on a Tuesday morning? What has he said to us earlier today? Maybe you told me that you’re busy. So if you told me you’re busy, I probably shouldn’t start talking to you, but I probably shouldn’t be silent forever. So I need to create some kind of time decay over that signal. It’s going to be very, very strong in the beginning and less and less strong over time and, and, and, and, and, all of those things go into a machine learning model that spits out yes or no to be proactive.

Peter Bowes (26:07)
And does L.A.Q.’ gender matter? She is clearly labelled as being female. Can it be male?

Dor Skuler (26:15)
She cannot be male. And please excuse us for not being politically correct here. We’re a small company. We can’t do everything. But we luckily asked our panel of a thousand older adults that helped us. And it was roughly half male, half female. The males either preferred a female or ambivalent. And the females wanted a female. Or to put it this way, nobody wanted a male persona. So…you know, instead of building the product essentially twice, we built it once based on a thousand zero vote we got from potential customers.

Peter Bowes (26:51)
Are you involved in any or planning any studies? I’m talking here scientific studies that could ultimately be peer reviewed in the journals, looking at people using your technology to see what impact it has on their health and potentially their longevity.

Dor Skuler (27:08)
Yeah, so I mentioned the results before, the 90% reduction in loneliness increasing. That is a university-led study. It was done by Duke University, Cornell Medical School, and Oakland University out of New Zealand on an N of about 450. So very large panel of customers for a very long period of time, for almost a year. A lot of time research would take like 30 people on a panel and that is peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Aging Research, which is kind of like that journal for aging. We welcome a lot more studies. We’re just, again, a small company. There’s a limit to what we can do. We’re working with health plans to measure the actual actuary benefit of LEQ. Does it help reduce hospitalization stays? Does it help reduce…frailty or the occurrence of, you know, of delayed dementia. There are a million things to test. So far we haven’t had the opportunity to do so, but if there is a researcher listening to this, parentheses, it will not ask us to pay for the research because we cannot, but it is an interesting research agenda that your university should fund, close parentheses, then please contact me and we would love to talk to you.

Peter Bowes (28:29)
Just want to end with a couple of more random questions. Based on your lifetime of interest in this area, you said you evolved an interest in human longevity. That’s essentially what we’re all about on this podcast. Longevity aspiring to a longer healthspan, maximising the number of healthy years that we have. Based on your knowledge, and especially of this technology, is there any advice that you would have given or you would like to have given to your younger self as it applies to this longevity issue.

Dor (29:03)
Okay, I’ll be honest for about this. Even though I haven’t really thought about it until you just asked me, probably to invest more in building more friendships because it’s very clear to me talking to so many of our customers and such that as we age, our circle gets smaller and smaller. And there’s a certain point in time where it’s harder for us to establish new relationships for whatever reason. Not again, you can’t generalize everybody’s different, et cetera, et cetera. But you get to a point where you’re losing things every day. Like you might be losing little bit of your eyesight and a little bit of your hearing and a little bit of your mobility and a spouse and and your job that gave you a lot of fulfillment and a sense of sense of self, etc. etc. I think the more you can invest in a interests outside of work, and it’s definitely true for me because I work way too many hours and be on a wide circle of friends, statistically, more will be left for you to hang out with and to stay in touch with over time and it’s really hard to do because when you’re busy and you’re sandwiched between caregiving for your parents and for your children and caring for your career and so on and so forth, it’s very, very tough to nurture a relationship so it will withstand time. yeah, so areas of interest outside of work and meaningful friendships.

Peter Bowes (30:34)
Yeah, it’s interesting. Very interesting that that was the first thought that came into your mind. And it is something that I hear a lot of people of a certain age, let’s say over 40, over 50, 60, reflecting on the fact that during their sometimes long and maybe difficult at times careers that they neglected the friends and the other people in their lives and then come to a realization at a later stage in their lives that those people, as you evolve through the decades, crucially important, not only to your wellbeing, but it helps everyone.

Dor Skuler (31:06)
Yeah, and guess one good question to ask ourselves is, we define ourselves so much by work, right? Like the first question you meet somebody, what do you do? Well, imagine for a second you’re not working anymore. Who are you? What are you? And if you are able to answer that essence and invest in those things, because the point of not working anymore could be very much an existential crisis for people. That then leads to…a lack of sense of purpose and then deterioration, et cetera.

Peter Bowes (31:34)
And final question, I see, I mean, clearly this is your company, you’ve evolved the technology, you have it with you in the room. I’m wondering, based again on your knowledge and your everyday life, how do you live your life with your longevity in mind? looking forward to the decades ahead and well, especially as it applies to what you’ve managed to produce within the company. Is there something that you do every day now that maybe you wouldn’t have done a few years ago because you believe it is good for you and potentially good for your longevity?

Dor Skuler (32:09)
Probably not enough. You know, it is not easy running a small technology company and it requires a lot of personal sacrifice and travel and long nights and especially I’m based in Israel so the time zone isn’t easy. But a few things I did kind of start doing that I truly neglected before starting to work in this space and that is one…read something interesting every single day. So for like a decade or so I wasn’t reading any books, I wasn’t like, I was just work, work, work, work, work, now like I force myself and it’s not hard to do once you get into the rhythm, it’s actually great to do, but to read especially things that are like, you know, not junk. And the other thing I neglected is just exercise – especially with jet lag and international flights and your routine, there’s no routine when you’re flying back and forth and you have little kids at home, cetera, et cetera. I carved out space for that. Beyond that, I can’t really give myself any credit. So, sorry.

Peter Bowes (33:19)
That’s a good answer. Just in closing, what does the future as far as the technology and your company have in store? What do you hope will be the next breakthrough for you?

Dor Skuler (33:28)
So it’s very hard to predict. mean, the field of artificial intelligence is changing in such a rapid pace that, you know, our products, the inside of our product is completely different than it was a year ago, not to mention five years ago because of large language models and GPTs and all of those things that are now built in and incorporated. So from a technology perspective, it’s hard for me to tell except that, you know, a year ago, could only talk to you about things we would program her and only have knowledge that we programmed her to have. And now she has essentially the entire set of human knowledge at her fingertips and can talk to you about any topic of interest. So I think from feature capability, it’s almost unlimited at this point. What we are starting to look at a lot more is how do we provide value to other people in the ecosystem surrounding the old app. So we were very, very focused on the older adult. How do we improve their quality of life? Now we’re spending a lot more time looking at the caregivers and their family. How can we help them? How can they essentially enlist an AI to be part of the circle caring for the older adult? And what does that mean? What capabilities need to come in there and how do you balance topics like privacy and agency of the older adult? Because we don’t want to lose their trust. ElliQ is for the older adult. It’s not for the caregiver but still be part of the equation. The healthcare payers and providers engaging this population is notoriously difficult and therefore it’s very hard for them to provide the type of care they want to give and they essentially have the same interest as the older as the older adult when you look at capitated plans they make money if you’re healthy they lose money if you’re hospitalized so there’s an alignment of interest there. And the third is the local community. We have the pleasure of working with many area agencies for the aging and office for the aging in different states. They have a ton of resources they’re bringing to bear that the older adult is not aware of or does not attend or consume. It’s the local senior center and there many events. It’s providing you a home-cooked meal when you’re feeling bad for a while or for longer than a while. And it’s Home Health Aid is helping you navigate the endless complexity of Medicare and Medicaid. They provide all of these things. So how can we bring them to the, you know, how can ElliQ bring them to the awareness of the older adult at the right time, contextually, and then make it totally seamless to consume? Like, you’re not feeling well, how about we just order you a mom’s meal today? So those are the areas that I’m really concerned about now. mean, our product managers will take care of the next set of features and every two or three weeks there’s an update to ElliQ with more features, but how do we bring the rest of the circle of care around ElliQ so holistically the different groups, healthcare, family, community can be coordinated and provide agency for the older adults to decide what to share, what to consume and be aware of all of those resources because there are a lot of resources as a community we bring to the older adult population.

Peter Bowes (36:44)
Yeah, fascinating. There are really endless possibilities. What does ElliQ cost?

Dor Skuler (36:49)
So people can go on our website, ElliQ.com. It costs between $50 and $60 a month, depending if people sign up for a year. And there’s an initiation fee to kind of help us cover shipping and handling and all the setup we do and so on and so forth. We made it as affordable as we can. A lot of people thought this will cost thousands and thousands of dollars. You look at Elon Musk talking about a $30,000 home robot.This is not that. And yet still it might not be out of reach for a lot of people. So luckily we have partnerships with the state of New York, in the state of Florida, and many other places where it’s actually 100% of the cost is covered by the state. But it’s obviously limited supply. They can’t cover it for everyone.

Peter Bowes (37:31)
Excellent. Well, it’s really fascinating work. I’m going to follow you with great interest in the future. I will put the details of your website and the transcript of this conversation in the show notes for this episode. But, Dor, it’s really good to talk to you. Thank you very much.

Dor Skuler (37:45)
Thank you so much for your interest and the great work you’re doing in bringing awareness to this space. Thank you so much.

The Live Long and Master Aging (LLAMA) podcast, a HealthSpan Media LLC production, shares ideas but does not offer medical advice. If you have health concerns of any kind, or you are considering adopting a new diet or exercise regime, you should consult your doctor.

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