Researchers at Bristol Robotics Laboratory have created the world’s first socially intelligent robotic personal trainer to guide people through exercise programmes.
The robot can provide motivational voice prompts and guide you through a regime, such as on a treadmill. It’s personalised based on data such as heart rate, speed, personality, mood and fitness level.
The researchers have added an extra dimension, with the robot capable of telling jokes, and show emotions.
The robot was developed as part of a study led by human-robot interaction experts Katie Winkle and Séverin Lemaignan, in collaboration with roboticists Paul Bremner and Praminda Caleb-Solly, psychologist Ute Leonards and rehabilitation expert Ailie Turton. Over the course of three months, 10 people participated in sessions with the robot three times a week in a gym at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).
Katie said: “We wanted to test if we could transfer the intelligence of our fitness instructor, an expert with the know-how to get the best out of clients, into a robot so it could become an effective personal coach. We aimed to create an engaging motivational companion to get our runners through Couch to 5k, which is quite a long and drawn out exercise programme.”
Participants received guidance from two different versions of the robot. The first was pre-programmed and gave standard instructions every 30 seconds based on the runner’s performance. The second was a bespoke form of the robot that had benefitted from expert input from a UWE Bristol fitness instructor.
Results showed runners preferred engaging with the socially intelligent ‘human-like’ robot, and performed better with this type of companion.
Katie said: “The socially intelligent robot knew nothing to begin with but learned ‘on-the-go’ by observing how our fitness instructor was motivating our runners. It then replicated his behaviours until the point where it could operate intelligently by itself.”
“We successfully created the first assistive robot able to learn complex social behaviours that take into account unique personalities. With the initial help of a human ‘teacher’, the robot developed its own unique way of interacting with its human partners, guiding them through tasks, but also appropriately challenging, encouraging or praising them, as humans would do.”
Dr Séverin Lemaignan, a Senior Research Fellow at the BRL, said “Our work shows a robot could be really useful in the gym, especially for people who would perhaps feel embarrassed with a human personal trainer. It’s great to see the robot was considered a colleague by our gym coach: the robot helps provide better support to the gym clients; he doesn’t see it as a threat to his role.
“More widely, the study demonstrated the potential for robots to be useful and effective in the real world, with many potential applications. If you can create robots that are socially intelligent in this way, that know how to encourage you and when, we could be seeing them in health and education. I’m really excited to see what contribution we can make and where we can take it next.”
