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This paper introduces the concept of "relational appliances" for health promotion, specifically exploring a robotic head inside a refrigerator designed to provide personalized dietary recommendations. A pilot study compared a health-promotion condition (robot recommending healthy snacks) against a social-chat control, measuring compliance, snack nutritional quality, and robot acceptance. The results indicated that participants found the robot persuasive and engaging, leading to increased awareness of snack choices and interest in having such a device at home.
Imagine your fridge giving you personalized health advice – this study shows that embedding a social robot in a kitchen appliance can actually make people more aware of their snacking habits and open to healthier choices.
Kitchen appliances are frequently used domestic artifacts situated at the point of everyday dietary decision making, making them a promising but underexplored site for health promotion. We explore the concept of relational appliances: everyday household devices designed as embodied social actors that engage users through ongoing, personalized interaction. We focus on the refrigerator, whose unique affordances, including a fixed, sensor-rich environment, private interaction space, and close coupling to food items, support contextualized, conversational engagement during snack choices. We present an initial exploration of this concept through a pilot study deploying an anthropomorphic robotic head inside a household refrigerator. In a home-lab apartment, participants repeatedly retrieved snacks during simulated TV"commercial breaks"while interacting with a human-sized robotic head. Participants were randomized to either a health-promotion condition, in which the robot made healthy snack recommendations, or a social-chat control condition. Outcomes included compliance with recommendations, nutritional quality of selected snacks, and psychosocial measures related to acceptance of the robot. Results suggest that participants found the robot persuasive, socially engaging, and increasingly natural over time, often describing it as helpful, aware, and companionable. Most participants reported greater awareness of their snack decisions and expressed interest in having such a robot in their own home. We discuss implications for designing relational appliances that leverage anthropomorphism, trust, and long-term human-technology relationships for home-based health promotion.
