If you’ve been naughty and scarfed down a bag of cookies or chips, your pooch won’t wag his tail or jump up and down when you get home. Instead, the dog will be lethargic and slow when he sees you.
But this is no ordinary dog.
This is Aibo, a "diet dog" designed by Cynthia Breazeal at the MIT Media Lab at Cambridge, who is known for creating the emotional robot Kismet.
This high-tech dog pooch will do some amazing things. Using a pedometer, bathroom scales and a PDA connected by Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, it will calculate caloric intake and even gather information about your activity level — things people have trouble figuring out and remembering, according to the British weekly, New Scientist.com.
So when you see Aibo and ask him, "How am I?,” he’ll respond with one of four behaviors, ranging from lethargy to energy, which mirror how you should feel, according to how much you ate.
If you’ve eaten the right number of calories for the day, Aibo will jump up and down, wag his tail, flash lights and even play upbeat music. If you ate badly and too much, Aibo will have, well, a hang-dog expression on his face.
What an intriguing idea. Dieters and sugar addicts can get help and information from a cute little dog, albeit an electronic one — in fact, it can provide "support that humans do not have the time, patience or interest to provide," Yahoo News notes.