Towards a Social and Mobile Humanoid Exercise Coach

In the near future, humanoid robots may be available to act as personal health coaches that can socially interact and exercise with people to increase their physical activity and improve their nutritional habits. Although there has been work to demonstrate the long-term effects of using a robot to motivate and record exercise and nutrition data, we are developing a social and mobile humanoid health coach that will explain and perform the physical exercises along with the human in an effort to increase their physical activity. In this paper, we describe a pilot study to compare the effects on young adults of coaching delivered by a social and mobile humanoid robot health coach versus a human health coach. While data analysis bore out no significant statistical effect of coach type on daily activity level, the results demonstrated encouraging trends and suggest further research with a larger sample size.