A Mobile Fitness Companion

The paper introduces a Mobile Companion prototype, which helps users to plan and keep track of their exercise activities via an interface based mainly on speech input and output. The Mobile Companion runs on a PDA and is based on a stand-alone, speaker-independent solution, making it fairly unique among mobile spoken dialogue systems, where the common solution is to run the ASR on a separate server or to restrict the speech input to some specific set of users. The prototype uses a GPS receiver to collect position, distance and speed data while the user is exercising, and allows the data to be compared to previous exercises. It communicates over the mobile network with a stationary system, placed in the user's home. This allows plans for exercise activities to be downloaded from the stationary to the mobile system, and exercise result data to be uploaded once an exercise has been completed. learning strategies). To this end, fifteen partners from eight different countries in Europe and the US will collaborate over a 4-year period. At this time, the project is barely half-way through, but two such conversational agent prototype systems have been built (3). One aims to enable dialogues about the user's photographs, while the other wants to support the user in upholding a healthy lifestyle. 1.2 The Health and Fitness Companion The second current Companion prototype, the Health and Fitness Companion, is shown in Figure 1. The Companion has a stationary ("home") component which accounts for the main part of the user interaction, and a mobile component which is the topic of the present paper. The system components communicate with each other over a regular mobile phone network. The overall prototype is described in detail in (4).