Robots for elderly care: the family guide

Six different products get sold under the phrase "robots for elderly care," and three of them will reach a private home on a normal timeline. The other three are a clinical device sold to care facilities, a waitlist, and a preorder. One fact sits underneath all six: nothing here, at any price, helps a person out of bed, into a shower, or up off the floor.

So shop against the problem you actually have. The brochures are selling a different one.

What exists, and what it costs

Prices come from each maker's own page, checked on 9 August 2026, except where the row says otherwise.

Type	Example	Cost	Can a family get one now?
Robotic pet	Joy for All cat or pup	$159.99 cat, $179.99 pup, one time	Yes, ships today
Conversational companion	ElliQ	$249 setup plus $39 to $59/month, or free via a state agency	Yes, ships today
Mobile screen on wheels	temi V3	$3,999, one time	Yes, ships today
Clinical therapy robot	PARO	No published US price, sold by quote; reported figures run about $5,000 to $6,400	Facilities, effectively not a household purchase
Fetch and carry assistant	Labrador Retriever	$1,499 up front plus $149/month for 36 months, about $6,863 over the term	No, waitlist with a $250 refundable deposit
Home humanoid	1X Neo	$20,000, or $499/month	No, preorder, deliveries not independently verified

Two notes on the bottom half of that table. Labrador Systems still tells reservation holders it plans "full production by the 2nd half of 2023" on the same page that takes the deposit (labradorsystems.com/reserve, 9 August 2026), which tells you how firm the timeline is. And Tombot's Jennie, the robotic Labrador puppy built for dementia care, is absent because there is nothing to price: the site says the first litter sold out and pricing comes "when we get closer to shipping" (tombot.com, 9 August 2026).

Match the machine to the actual problem

Families usually arrive at this search with one of four situations, and the right answer differs for each.

An empty day. A parent alone for long stretches, losing the thread of the week. This is the case the category is built for, and its cheapest product is often the right one. A Joy for All pet needs no WiFi, no account and no help from anyone, and costs $159.99 once. If it does not land, you are out the price of a nice dinner.

Missed medication, a slipping routine, no one checking in. This is ElliQ's job: it starts the conversations, gives medication and appointment reminders, nudges hydration and movement, and sends wellness updates to a family caregiver app. It also runs on a lease. Retail is $249 to start plus $59 a month, dropping to $49 on the annual plan or $39 on the 24-month plan, billed $936 at signup (elliq.com, 9 August 2026). At $59 a month, year one costs $957. Read the funding section below before paying any of it, and the side-by-side on these two tiers if you are torn between them.

Distance. If the person is sharp and the trouble is that you live four states away, a robot can be an expensive way to buy a video call. A mobile screen like temi does let a remote relative drive around the house and talk, which a tablet on a counter cannot, and $3,999 is a real number to weigh against visiting more often.

Physical limits. Carrying, bending, reaching, and walking, which has its own short shelf of robot walkers and exoskeletons. The thinnest tier by far, and the subject of the next section.

What the research supports

The category earns its keep on loneliness, and the evidence for that is now reasonably strong. A 2025 meta-analysis in The Gerontologist pooled 19 studies and 1,083 older adults and found social robots reduced loneliness with an overall effect of -0.59 (p < .001), which the authors call large (DOI 10.1093/geront/gnaf219).

Three caveats for a family shopping for one person at home. The effect ran larger in care settings than for older adults living independently, which is the situation most readers here are in. The authors flag funnel-plot asymmetry, so read -0.59 as large but probably inflated. And it moves loneliness specifically: quality of life and anxiety hold up far less well across the reviews. Outcome by outcome, our read of the research.

The gap nobody has filled

The robot every family imagines is the one that lifts. It was built once, as research. RIKEN and Sumitomo Riko announced ROBEAR on 23 February 2015: a 140 kg nursing-care robot for lifting a patient from a bed into a wheelchair. The same release gives the reason it was needed, that care staff perform that lift an average of 40 times a day, and carries an addendum saying the collaboration center that built it closed at the end of March 2015 (RIKEN, 2015).

Eleven years later there is still no transfer robot a family can buy. The nearest thing on the market carries a tray, and it is taking deposits rather than making deliveries.

Home humanoids are marketed straight at this gap, so read the dated timeline behind the marketing before the ads do their work. 1X sells Neo at $20,000 or $499 a month, and its own order page describes a scheduled "Expert Mode" in which a 1X expert remotely supervises the robot for tasks it does not know, plus a remote control feature letting the owner pilot it from a phone or VR headset (1x.tech/order, 9 August 2026). A human in the loop is a reasonable engineering answer, and it also means a remote operator can be driving a machine around your mother's living room. That belongs in the family conversation before the deposit does.

Who pays, and the free channel most families miss

For a person living at home, none of these is sold with an insurance-billing path. ElliQ's FAQ runs through cancellation, WiFi, and fees and says nothing about Medicare or private coverage, and what it sells is a lease agreement rather than medical equipment.

The money that does exist here is agency money. ElliQ's main channel is state and county aging agencies, which buy units and provide them free to eligible older adults, including a 12-month premium subscription, home installation and shipping (elliq.com/pages/free, 9 August 2026). That page's headline still says five states while the partner list beneath it names agencies in more than five, so check your own rather than counting. New York's Office for the Aging alone made roughly 900 units available, and runs a separate loaner program for animatronic pets. Step by step: how to get ElliQ free through your state.

The federal Eldercare Locator, 1-800-677-1116 (call or text) routes you to your county's Area Agency on Aging, the body that funds these programs whether or not ElliQ has a contract in your state.

What kills these devices

Buy with the failure record in view. Cutii, a French mobile companion robot aimed at exactly this audience, is gone: its maker CareClever was put into judicial liquidation in 2023, and both product domains now redirect elsewhere (rechecked 9 August 2026). Jibo and Kuri, the best-funded home companion robots of the last decade, died with their companies.

So the more a device leans on an account, a subscription and a company staying solvent, the more it needs someone younger nearby who can fix it. For a parent with dementia, or one who will not call support, the machine with no app is usually the one still working a year later.

Before you order anything

• Decide who administers it. WiFi password, account, app notifications. If the answer is "my parent," pick the tier with no account.
• Read the exit terms. ElliQ charges a $1,500 device non-return fee if the unit is not sent back within 45 days of cancellation, and the 30-day risk-free trial applies only to the Annual and 24-month plans, not the monthly one (elliq.com FAQs, 9 August 2026).
• Annualize before you compare. $59 a month is $708 a year, which buys four robotic pets.
• Ask about cameras. Anything with a lens needs a conversation with the person who will live with it, not only with the siblings on the group chat.
• Check the exact variant. Joy for All's tuxedo cat was out of stock direct and pointing to Amazon on 9 August 2026, while the silver and orange tabby cats were available at $159.99.

If you only make one call, make it the Area Agency on Aging, and ask two questions: does the county fund companion robots for people living alone, and does it loan animatronic pets. Those are separate programs with separate budgets. New York runs both, and an agency that has no ElliQ contract may still have a shelf of robotic cats.

Then price each machine against what it does. The pet arrives working and asks nothing of anyone. The companion buys structure and a caregiver dashboard for roughly $600 to $960 a year. The robot that does the caregiving has not shipped, and the last serious attempt at it closed its lab in 2015. Plan the coming years around the human hours you can arrange, and treat the hardware as the thing that makes those hours easier to schedule.