Work towards the development of a handheld health counseling agent designed to promote physical activity is described. Previous work on automated health counselors is discussed, along with the affordances of mobility and context awareness for health behavior interventions. We present a general-purpose software architecture for the rapid design and deployment of mobile health counseling agents. We also describe the results of an initial field trial in which such a mobile agent plays the role of an exercise coach designed to motivate users to walk more. Results were mixed. We found that the context awareness mechanism that was implemented for detecting walking led to greater user-agent social bonding, but less walking in study participants.

描述了旨在促进身体活动的手持健康咨询代理的开发工作。讨论了以前关于自动化健康顾问的工作，以及健康行为干预的移动性和情境意识的可供性。我们提出了一种用于快速设计和部署移动健康咨询代理的通用软件架构。我们还描述了初始现场试验的结果，其中这样的移动代理扮演运动教练的角色，旨在激励用户多走路。结果喜忧参半。我们发现为检测步行而实施的上下文感知机制导致了更大的用户代理社交联系，但研究参与者的步行更少。