A Socially Assistive Robot Exercise Coach for the Elderly

TLDR

The study introduces a socially assistive robot designed to motivate elderly people to exercise and evaluates its effectiveness and the impact of physical versus virtual embodiment. The system employs a design methodology grounded in psychology on intrinsic motivation, incorporates five design principles for SAR therapeutic interventions, and details its implementation. The study found that the SAR effectively motivates exercise in older adults and that participants preferred the physically embodied robot over a virtual coach in terms of enjoyment, helpfulness, and social attraction.

Abstract

We present a socially assistive robot (SAR) system designed to engage elderly users in physical exercise. We discuss the system approach, design methodology, and implementation details, which incorporate insights from psychology research on intrinsic motivation, and we present five clear design principles for SAR-based therapeutic interventions. We then describe the system evaluation, consisting of a multi-session user study with older adults (n = 33), to evaluate the effectiveness of our SAR exercise system and to investigate the role of embodiment by comparing user evaluations of similar physically and virtually embodied coaches. The results validate the system approach and effectiveness at motivating physical exercise in older adults according to a variety of user performance and outcomes measures. The results also show a clear preference by older adults for the physically embodied robot coach over the virtual coach in terms of enjoyableness, helpfulness, and social attraction, among other factors.