Just in Time Information for Exercise Adoption

What happens if you put an exercise coach on a wearable computer? What if the coach could actually sense whether you were doing your exercise or not? And, what if the coach were designed to get to know you, your personal likes and dislikes, and something about your life plans?

This project explores these questions through the development and evaluation of an innovative automated portable exercise advisor system. The system incorporates a PDA, a motion sensor (accelerometer), and a relational agent, and is designed to interact with people over extended periods of time to set and follow up on daily exercise goals.

Once developed, the system will be used in a year-long field study in which volunteers will use it for eight weeks at a time to test how well different aspects of the system works. There are two primary research questions we are investigating in the study:

  1. Is it more effective to provide motivational messages at the point in time when people are deciding whether or not to exercise, compared to the same messages delivered in a review session at the end of the day (retrospectively, as is currently done in most behavior change interventions)?
  2. Is it more effective for motivational messages to be delivered by a relational agent (a personal, social, animated conversational coach), compared to the same messages delivered by a non-relational, text-only interface?

This research is being supported by a grant from the NIH National Library of Medicine (1R21LM008553), and is a collaborative effort between Northeastern University, MIT and Harvard Medical School.

 

Team Members

Timothy Bickmore (PI), Northeastern University

Amanda Gruber, Harvard Medical School

Stephen Intille, MIT

Daniel Mauer, Northeastern University

Publications

Bickmore, T. and Mauer, D. “Modalities for Building Relationships with Handheld Computer Agents” (2006) Proceedings CHI 2006 Conference. [PDF]

Publications from related projects:

Bickmore, T. and Giorgino, T., "Health Dialog Systems for Patients and Consumers" (to appear) Journal of Biomedical Informatics. [PDF]

Bickmore, T., Caruso, L., Clough-Gorr, K., and Heeren, T. (to appear) “’It’s just like you talk to a friend’ – Relational Agents for Older Adults” Interacting with Computers. [PDF]

Bickmore, T., Gruber, A., and Picard, R. (to appear) "Establishing the Computer-Patient Working Alliance in Automated Health Behavior Change Interventions" Patient Education and Counseling. [PDF]

J. Ho and S. S. Intille, "Using context-aware computing to reduce the perceived burden of interruptions from mobile devices," in Proceedings of CHI 2005 Connect: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY: ACM Press, 2005. [PDF]

S. S. Intille, "A new research challenge: persuasive technology to motivate healthy aging," Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 8(3), pp. 235-237, 2004. [PDF]

 

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