Imagine something between a computer game and a pet that helps makes you slim. One inventor did just that and came up with Autom — a robot that will look dieters in the eye and tell them what they need to hear.
Users can have daily conversations with the 38cm-tall robot, which will crunch calories and provide feedback and encouragement on their weight-loss progress.
For those who hate manuals — there isn’t one. Switch Autom on and it’s ready to go.
Its blue eyes open and its head swivels as a computer inside its head allows it to search for a human face in front of it and maintain eye contact.
“Hello, I’m Autom! Press one of the buttons below to talk to me,” it says in a robotic female voice with an American accent. “I’m ready to get started. Let’s keep working together.”
Users tap their details onto the robot’s screen in response to its spoken questions about weight, diet, exercise regime and goals and over time it builds up a knowledge of the dieter’s strengths and weaknesses to tailor its questions and advice accordingly.
The information is also processed to provide graphs on their progress and habits over time.
The brainchild of Cory Kidd, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a doctorate in human-robot interaction, Autom hits the US market later this year, retailing for about US$500.
The US$80 billion weight-loss market in the US has already been targeted by Nintendo with its Wii Fit and My Weight Loss Coach games, but Kidd is banking on Autom offering dieters a more personalized way of using technology to slim down.
It is a so-called sociable robot, a new generation of robots that adapt their behavior in order to interact with humans.
Autom looks fairly simplistic, with a head and neck attached to a rectangular box-shaped body on two stumpy legs. Its face has no nose and only the hint of a mouth.
But the cutting-edge field of human-robot interaction combines insights from the social sciences as well as technology and medicine
“It draws heavily on human psychology — so understanding how we as people interact with one another,” Kidd said. “It relies on cues that people use in everyday communication.”
For example, Autom looks down at the screen on its torso briefly when asking for the user to put in information, in the way people naturally glance at something they are mentioning.
Next year a more developed model will be released that uses voice recognition technology so the dieter can speak to the robot as well as communicate via the touch screen.
Lona Sandon, assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas, had not seen Autom in action and said she was reserving judgment about how successful the product would be.
“For some people it could be a good tool. You need constant feedback so I can see how it would be beneficial but there is a novelty factor and some will just get bored of it when that wears off like they do with everything else,” said Sandon, who is also a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.
But according to Kidd, Autom’s human qualities, if primitive, were an important factor in keeping 15 dieters motivated during a trial in the Boston area.
Another 15 slimmers were given a computer with a touch screen running identical software to Autom’s and 15 had a paper log. Each had to stick to a certain eating and exercise regime.
The average time someone used the robot — almost 51 days — was nearly twice as long as with paper — almost 27 days — and 40 percent longer than with the computer.
“Even if you have an animated character that looks exactly like Autom on the computer screen, you cannot have the same interaction as you can with an actual robot,” Kidd says.
“The robot was a rougher version of this one but was extremely effective at engaging someone over a period of time and helping them to stick with whatever diet program they were on.”
Kidd says the fact that people were able to humanize Autom made the information it gave them seem more credible. Maya, Casper and Robbie were among the names users gave their robots. Some even dressed them in hats and scarves.
“When people develop a kind of bond with something, it’s almost like a pet,” says Kidd.
As the costs come down for certain technologies, Kidd says users will have more opportunity to personalize the robot — the color, the clothes, the personality. Even the voice could be customized to sound like that of your favorite celebrity.
“You’ll see a lot of changes in the next few years. In 30 years this is going to look very primitive,” he said.
“Technology has really advanced in the last decade to allow us to finally create something like this. A lot of what goes into this would 10 years ago have not been possible. Five years ago it would not have been feasible and two years ago it would not have been affordable.”
Kidd’s company Intuitive Automata is based in Hong Kong and Autom also speaks Chinese — both Cantonese and Mandarin.
Initially, though, the company will use an English-language version to target the US, where the government estimates two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, followed by Europe.
Kidd is confident the model can be adapted to different languages and cultures as well as other health issues — chronic disease management, diabetes, even drug and alcohol abuse.
The UN Economic Commission and the International Federation of Robotics forecast a market for personal and service robots worth about US$52 billion by 2025.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist