Developing a Co-eating Agent for Food Education

Food education, called Shokuiku in Japanese that teaches about the agricultural environment, food cherishing, nutrition, and healthy eating through lectures and practice, is getting attention. Based on the demand for diversified food education for different age groups, digital food education has been promoted. Besides, lack of encouragement to eat healthily poses risks of unhealthy eating. Some agents developed for caring needs that monitor the users’ diet but could not eat together and did not provide structured food education content. Inspired by these problems, we intended to achieve effective food education by developing a virtual co-eating agent with the capability of eating virtual food and teaching structured food education. We developed a co-eating agent for food education and conducted user studies with 6 Japanese students and 6 international students. Participants attended a one-on-one lab-based food education workshop with an agent, including a 5-min co-eating and a 15-min food education lecture. The results showed that the participants felt the sense of eating together with the agent, had a positive impression of the agent, had positive learning satisfaction and their sugar literacy scores were improved. Based on the results, the effectiveness of the co-eating agent for food education and the relationship between the impression and learning outcome were discussed. It is suggested to provide co-eating activities with structured educational content and explore how to maintain the perceived meal similarity of co-eating agents for food education.