Publications

2026

1. Designing a Conversational Exercise Coach for Aging Adults: Engagement, Motivation, and Interaction

   Rayna Hata, Roshni Kaushik, Reid Simmons, and Aaron Steinfeld

   In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 2026

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   Exercise supports healthy aging, but motivation often declines with age, increasing demand on therapists and coaches. We present a conversational robotic exercise coach that promotes engagement and assesses motivation through dialogue. In a WoZ study with ten adults aged 59 and above, participants showed varied interaction styles; even those with low motivation rated sessions positively, suggesting such agents can enhance exercise enjoyment. We identify three design needs for autonomous coaches: rephrasing for clarity, conversation beyond exercise, and adaptable speech delivery.

2025

1. Choosing Robot Feedback Style to Optimize Human Exercise Performance

   Roshni Kaushik, Rayna Hata, Aaron Steinfeld, and Reid Simmons

   In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Melbourne, Australia, 2025

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   Different people respond to feedback and guidance in different ways, and their preferences may change based on their mood, tiredness, etc. We present a robot exercise coach that provides verbal and nonverbal feedback in two different styles: firm and encouraging. We collect a dataset of people experiencing both feedback styles and show that the style that someone performs best with may not be the one they have the best subjective experience with or be the one that they state they prefer. To account for this, we present a contextual bandit approach that enables the robot coach to learn the best style to use over time to improve the human’s performance, and show that this approach performs quite well in expectation on the real human data.

2. Social Buddy or Exercise Coach? Exploring Older Adults’ Preferences for System Personality in Exercise Support

   Rayna Hata, Max Hu, Reid Simmons, and Aaron Steinfeld

   In Workshop at HAI 2025, 2025

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2024

1. 

   Co-designing an Accessible Quadruped Navigation Assistant

   Stacy A Doore, Narit Trikasemsak, Alexandra Gillespie, Andrea Giudice, and Rayna Hata

   In 2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN), 2024

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2. Values-Guided Agile Robotics Research

   Alexandra Gillespie, Narit Trikasemsak, Rayna Hata, Andrea Giudice, and Stacy A Doore

   Workshop on Assistive Applications, Accessibility, and Disability Ethics (A3DE) at HRI 2024, 2024

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3. See Spot Guide: Accessible Interfaces for an Assistive Quadruped Robot

   Rayna Hata, Narit Trikasemsak, Andrea Giudice, and Stacy A Doore

   arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.11125, 2024

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