Abstract
Preventing diseases of affluence is one of the major challenges for our future society. Researchers introduced robots as a tool to support people on dieting or rehabilitation tasks. However, deploying robots as exercising companions is cost-intensive. Therefore, in our current work, we are investigating how the embodiment of an exercising partner influences the exercising motivation to persist on an abdominal plank exercise. We analyzed and compared data from previous experiments on exercising with robots and virtual agents. The results show that the participants had longer exercising times when paired with a robot companion compared to virtual agents, but not compared to a human partner. However, participants perceived the robots partner as more likable than a human partner. This results have implications for SAR practitioners and are important for the usage of SAR to promote physical activity.
Supported by grants from the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology ‘CITEC’ (EXC 277), Bielefeld University.
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Notes
- 1.
All of these facts are on the WHO website:http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity, retrieved 08/14/2018.
- 2.
They distinguished different levels of an agent’s presence (i.e., embodied remote-located vs. virtually represented), but here we are referring to both as VAs).
- 3.
Participants reported in post-study interviews that they would have liked to exercise longer but that they had too much pain in the wrist due to the exercises.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Feltz et al. for providing their dataset and discussing their work which was supported by grant 1R21HL111916-01A1 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
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Schneider, S., Kummert, F. (2018). Comparing the Effects of Social Robots and Virtual Agents on Exercising Motivation. In: Ge, S., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11357. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05204-1_44
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