DoggoRoomie

‚Sedentary lifestyle‘ - does that ring a bell? Research has uncovered a massive trend of life shifting from the physical to digital environment through the trend of home office and usage of social media, whereas the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this development with lockdowns leading to increased screen time and reduced physical activity causing health risks, as well. Our project DoggoRoomie tackled this issue by designing and implementing a zoomorphic social companion robot with a fluffy dog-like appearance specializing on nudging you into active behavior and out of your sedentary lifestyle promoting completion of active tasks such as chores in a homelike setting. We set up a homey living room environment with ambient lighting, music, a digital fireplace, et cetera, providing a comfortable setting to study and test our robot dog on its effectiveness and people’s compliance with it based on its different nudging approaches with varying intrusiveness levels supported by the visual and auditory design of the robot. Our study aimed at figuring out whether our - based on previous related work - design choices for the robot were effective for our overall goal, as well as could provide helpful design recommendations for future work in designing zoomorphic robots.