A Socially Assistive Robot Exercise Coach for the Elderly

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Fasola & Matarić. A SAR Exercise Coach for the Elderlythat our robot agent not only provides active guidance, feedback, and task monitoring, butis also directly responsible for instructing and steering the task as well. Hence, our agentis both an administrator and an active participant in the health-related activity, resultingin a unique characteristic of the system: The social interaction between the robot and useris not only useful for maintaining user engagement and influencing intrinsic motivation,but is also necessary to achieving the physical exercise task.2.3 The Effect of EmbodimentPrevious studies investigating the role of embodiment within the context of human-agentinteraction have demonstrated the potential positive effects that physical embodiment canhave on people’s level of engagement and overall perception of the agents with whichthey are interacting. Wainer, Feil-Seifer, Shell, & Matarić, (2006, 2007) showed thathealthy adult participants engaging in a physical/cognitive task, a Towers of Hanoi tabletopgame, reported a strong preference for a physically embodied SAR system oversimilar video-only agents in terms of appeal, perceptiveness, watchfulness, helpfulness,and enjoyableness. Powers, Kiesler, Fussell, and Torrey (2007) compared interactionsbetween robots and similar computer-simulated agents that engaged participants in aconversation about basic health habits, and found that participants rated the robots asmore helpful, more lifelike, and possessing more positive personality traits than thecomputer-based agents. Bartneck (2003) conducted a study comparing the effectivenessof an emotionally expressive robot, eMuu, with its screen character version in engagingusers in a simple negotiation task, and found that participants exerted more effort andreceived higher task scores when interacting with the physical eMuu than with thesimulated eMuu. Jung and Lee (2004) also demonstrated the positive effects of physicalembodiment in relation to interactions with both a Sony Aibo robot and ananthropomorphic dancing robot, April. Bainbridge, Hart, Kim, and Scassellati (2011)found that users in a book-moving task were more likely to fulfill an unusual request andafford more personal space to the agent when interacting with a physically present robotthan when interacting with a live video feed of the same robot on a computer screen.Kidd and Breazeal (2008) compared a robotic weight-loss coach (a touch screen with aphysical head capable of looking at and speaking to the user) to a similar touch-screenonlydevice and found that participants interacting with the robotic coach chose tocontinue with the weight-loss program for twice as long as those interacting with thecomputer-only device.While studies such as those mentioned above have previously investigated the effectof physical embodiment in human-agent interaction, most have recruited a participantpool consisting primarily of young adults. However, older adults often responddifferently to technology than young adults, as studies have shown (Balakrishnan &Yeow, 2007; Kang & Yoon, 2008), and thus the observed effects do not necessarilygeneralize across the age span.Embodiment studies that have targeted the elderly population include the work ofHeerink, Kröse, Evers, and Wielinga (2010), who investigated the acceptance of assistivesocial agents by older adults. While their study was similar to our work, the robot used intheir evaluation was a table-top robot (the iCat), and was either controlled via a humanoperator during interaction with elderly users (Wizard of Oz study), or interacted withusers through a touch-screen interface. Furthermore, the interaction consisted primarily ofshort informational or utility interactions (e.g., medication/agenda reminders, weatherforecast, companionship), lasting about 5 minutes and often involving only a single4
Fasola & Matarić. A SAR Exercise Coach for the Elderlysession. Lastly, their work did not explore the agent’s role in actively motivating the userto engage in the task, and instead focused solely on the effect of embodiment. In contrast,our SAR system was designed to engage elderly users in fluid, highly interactive exercisesessions, completely autonomously, while providing active feedback, motivation, andguidance on the task. Also, our user study spanned multiple sessions, each lasting 20minutes, for the dual purpose of system evaluation and comparison between two differentSAR coaching embodiments.The interactivity of the sessions is important because, as we discuss in the nextsection, the fluidity of the interaction can have a positive influence on the user’s intrinsicmotivation to engage in the task and can thereby increase his or her enjoyment levelduring interaction. It is thus interesting to investigate whether the positive effectsintroduced by the interaction characteristics might somehow alleviate any potentialnegative effects resulting from embodiment characteristics. Our study addresses thispossibility in capturing user evaluations of the system between study groups.To the best of our knowledge, our user study is the first to comprehensivelydemonstrate the positive effect of physical embodiment in a SAR-guided healthcarescenario, wherein the SAR agent serves as both an instructor and active participant in thehealthcare task with target users.3. Robot Exercise Coach3.1 Approach and MethodologyOur approach to designing our SAR system to help address the physical exercise needs ofthe elderly population was motivated by two basic axioms indicating the essentialqualities that the SAR agent coach must possess: 1) the ability to influence the user’sintrinsic motivation to perform the task, and 2) the ability to personalize the socialinteraction to maintain user engagement in the task and build trust in the task-basedhuman-robot relationship. Following the above axioms, we developed five designprinciples for the SAR system; all are general and can be applied to any SAR-basedtherapeutic intervention.3.1.1 Design PrinciplesThe design principles stated that the robot coach should be as follows: 1) motivating, 2)fluid and highly interactive, 3) personable, 4) intelligent, and 5) task-driven. Thefollowing discussion elaborates on the importance of each of these qualities in the contextof providing healthcare interventions and details how each was incorporated into ourSAR exercise system.1) Motivating. The coaching style and interaction methodology of our SAR exercisesystem was guided by psychology research in the area of intrinsic motivation. Intrinsicmotivation, in contrast to extrinsic motivation, which is driven by external rewards,comes from within an individual and is based on pleasure derived from engaging in anactivity. Specifically, our aim was for the robot to be capable of increasing the user’sintrinsic motivation to perform the therapeutic task (physical exercise, in this case).Intrinsic motivation has been shown to be more effective than extrinsic motivation inachieving long-term user task compliance and behavior change (Dienstbier & Leak,1976), which is the ultimate goal for any health-related intervention, technology-based or5
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