A Coaster Robot that Encourages Office Workers to Drink Water

In this study, we propose a health maintenance support robot for desk workers. Employees who concentrate on desk-work tend to become dehydrated, and chronic dehydration leads to poor health. Generally, people who concentrate on a task fail to notice that they are dehydrated. Therefore, we propose a robot that encourages office workers to drink water. This robot is shaped like a coaster and tries to encourage a desk worker to drink water by generating a periodic sound. We create a robot prototype and investigate a suitable interval length between each encouragement. Additionally, we investigate the influence of the encouragements on the efficiency of workers.