Conveniently forgetting the food diary while out to dinner, crumpling up the exercise plan taped to the fridge or even hitting delete on the whole health resolution: easy. Looking into the eyes of a sweet little robot dedicated to helping you lose weight and announcing that you're throwing in the towel: not so much. At least that's the goal of the designers of Autom, a robotic weight-loss coach who checks in every day with a friendly and encouraging conversation about her owner's health goals.
Autom's designers hope that people will become attached to the robot, who looks something like Eva from Disney/Pixar's WALL-E, and that the relationship will strengthen a person's commitment to better health. A camera in the robot's head keeps her blinking eyes turned towards a human while she's talking to him (“My eye movements can be a little strange, as you've probably noticed. The engineers are still working on getting it right,” she says in the video below). Though Autom does not yet operate with speech-recognition, she speaks in a not-so-bad fem-bot voice, while her words appear on a front side touchscreen, which the human uses to respond.
This YouTube video from this year's CES, the world's largest consumer technology show, features one of the robot's creators, Cory Kidd, explain and demonstrate how she works.
Intuitive Automata, the company which plans to start selling Autom to large health employers in the United States in the next few months for about $500-600, proves the robot's abilities with a case study. According to their website:
A randomized, controlled medical study showed that individuals using Autom to help keep with their diet were much more successful than those who used more traditional methods, like a paper log or a computer program.
In part, this might be because Autom is so nice– she never scolds a human for slipping up, just offers positive encouragement and suggestions to be more successful. And if you already have the cell phone app that acts like a girlfriend, does that make a cabinet full of batteries the real secret to happiness?
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