Designing a Motivational Agent for Behavior Change in Physical Activity

摘要

People find behavior change particularly long-lasting change in habits regarding physical activity to be difficulty. While new technologies such as mobile applications that help individuals measure, log, and reflect on their activities hold great promise, they rely on individuals already having the motivation to change their behaviors. How can technology motivate people in increasing their level of physical activity? We explore this question through the design, development, and evaluation of an automated assistance system that draws on a counseling method called motivational interviewing (MI) and utilizes a humanlike robot as a motivational agent. Through dialogue and nonverbal engagement, the agent enables individuals to talk about and reflect on underlying reasons for their lack of motivation regarding physical activity in order to increase intrinsic motivation for behavior change. In this work-in-progress, we describe our system design and discuss findings from a preliminary study that evaluated the impact of the robot's use of MI on user motivation and behavior.