“Mom’s New Plus-One: An AI Pet?”Why this growth investor is bullish on robots for seniors in the home.

Meghan FitzGerald is a geriatric nurse practitioner, healthcare investor, and healthcare policy professor who studies and invests in the future of aging and care delivery.  

By now, you’ve probably seen the news that Washington State is the first in the nation to authorize a statewide reimbursement code for a companion AI robot. This is a significant moment—an opportunity I’ve envisioned for years now taking shape.

I wear a few hats in my professional life. I’m an investor, former executive and board member, and a licensed acute geriatric nurse practitioner. At age sixteen, I was a live-in caregiver for my grandmother, Oma, who had Alzheimer’s—an experience that profoundly shaped my clinical path and interests in senior care.  

We are at the precipice of something very big, and we’re not paying enough attention. I’ve been on a three-year journey examining how robotics and AI are colliding with the growing tsunami of chronic disease in an aging population.

Seniors benefit from interaction, touch, and comfort - especially in moments of need or when alone. Sometimes it’s a hand. Sometimes it’s a familiar object. Soon, I believe it may be a fluffy robot.

The US healthcare system is gliding into a clinical world where intelligence is ambient—and soon, embodied. Not as cold machines, but as adjunct companions: a voice, a presence, perhaps something that looks and behaves like a pet. But a functional pet that can provide a variety of different utilities, such as emergency alerts and medication reminders. 

Throughout my career working in long-term care settings, providers have relied on simple tools to help manage loneliness and cognitive decline—games, toys, tactile objects, even the occasional ugly doll—anything seniors can touch, hold, and engage with. However, the technological solution for seniors will look less like a scary Terminator or fussy C-3PO and more symbolic to Wilson, Tom Hanks’s trusted volleyball companion in Cast Away. 

The need is enormous. Aside from cognitive challenges, loneliness is a baseline experience for a third of aging adults, resulting in three times the rate of higher death and a 68% higher hospitalization risk.  As caregiver shortages deepen and more seniors spend their final decade alone, AI-powered companion pets may become a simple but powerful presence—sitting beside them, listening, remembering, and offering emotional support.