could artificial intelligence be the secret to working off all those extra post-christmas kilos scientists in England seem to think so after creating the world's first robot fitness trainer meets your new gym buddy as thousands hit the treadmill post-christmas it could be robots that keep our new year resolutions intact scientists at the university of the west of england have worked with fitness instructors to develop what it claims is the world's first socially intelligent robot trainer so we had a real fitness instructor teaching the robot when to give encouragement what encouragement to give when is the right time to do that and we wanted to see whether we could take the human social intelligence of the fitness instructor and really program that into the robot ten runners took part in the 12-week study the robot that was trained by the fitness instructor was much more engaging and much more personalized as well so our robot was able to learn how to motivate different people differently so we found that our innovative machine learning approach was really able to capture our fitness instructors very high level social intelligence and really get that into the robot so Louis what's it like taking instructions from a robot it's interesting it's definitely you know the experience and once you get over the initial shock it's very motivating robots may not be replacing personal trainers just yet but for many technology will play a big role in getting fit this new year Dan Whitehead Sky News in Bristol