A 4-Week Digital Physical Activity Intervention Based Program to Investigate its Impact on Physical Activity

This project is designed to investigate the impact and efficacy of the new digital method (i.e. a commercially available social humanoid robot with a tablet interface) to deliver a physical activity intervention-based program over a 4-week period. It is intended that this trial will explore how a social humanoid robot can help people set physical activity goals and encourage them to achieve them. The intervention does not prescribe specific exercises nor a minimum frequency and/or duration of exercise. It rather focuses on encouraging and helping people to achiever a physical activity goal of their choosing. This will be done through interactive sessions that involve participants interacting with the social robot and completing physical activity logs and surveys/questionnaires to evaluate metrics such as confidence and level of physical activity. The interactive sessions will not be supervised. However, they will take place in a controlled environment and a member of the research team will be nearby during the session to assist participants if needed. Participants will not interact with the Pepper robot outside of the scheduled, interactive sessions. Participants will complete two 60-minute in-person sessions conducted at Monash University. This session will include a Pepper robot leading the session which involves content and training to deliver a robot-adapted version of a physical activity and goal setting (or evaluation) based program. The first session will occur at the beginning of the program, Week O, and the content delivered by the Pepper robot will focus on goal setting. The second session will be conducted in Week 2 and focus on evaluating how the participant is tracking. Each participant will complete the sessions on their own, working and interacting with the robot to complete the content. At the end of the second session, participants will be invited to complete a 10-minute interview with a research team member about their experience with the robot program. Participants will receive two weekly emails after the first session until the end of the 4-week program that involves completing additional program content that is expected to take 5 - 10 minutes to complete. The first email will be a general reminder to ensure participants are logging their physical activity on the website portal. The second email will contain the same reminder as the first plus a reminder to complete the surveys based on how they are feeling. Participants will be asked to complete 3 x 20-minute online questionnaires at week zero, two and four weeks.