Exercise with Social Robots: Companion or Coach?

TL;DR

This study explores whether people prefer social robots as exercise companions or coaches, using questionnaires to assess user perceptions and preferences in different roles.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology combining multiple questionnaires to evaluate user preferences for social robot roles in exercise settings.

Findings

Preliminary results suggest varied user preferences for robot roles.

The study demonstrates the feasibility of assessing social robot roles through questionnaires.

Future work will focus on personalized robot coaching systems.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other approaches they are used as motivational aids. These are two "paradigms", so to speak, within the small but growing area of robots for social exercise. We designed an online questionnaire to test whether the preferred role in which people want to see robots would be the companion or the coach. The questionnaire asks people to imagine working out with a robot with the help of three utilized questionnaires: (1) CART-Q which is used for judging coach-athlete relationships, (2) the mind perception questionnaire and (3) the System Usability Scale (SUS). We present the methodology, some preliminary results as well as our intended future work on personal robots for coaching.