Abstract
Physical exercise provides beneficial effects on health enhancement and prevention from care needs. However, it is difficult to continue physical exercise spontaneously. In this paper, we present the concept of the system to promote physical activity that can be used easily at home, and introduce the idea that the system should encourage users to ensure their continuous usage. As a first attempt, we developed a prototype robot to encourage users to start an exercise game. Impressions produced by the encouragement of the real robot compared to that of the 2-D moving image on a computer monitor was analyzed using the semantic differential method. Sixteen male undergraduate students in their 20 s who gave written informed consents participated in the experiment. As a result, more positive scores were obtained in the real robot for 6 of 28 adjective pairs, which suggested that the promotion by the real robot works more effectively.
