Toward Sensor-In-the-Loop LLM Agent: Benchmarks and Implications

This paper explores sensor-informed personal agents that can take advantage of sensor hints on wearables to enhance the personal agent's response. We demonstrate that such a sensor-in-the-loop AI agent design can be easily integrated into existing LLM agents by building a prototype named WellMax based on existing well-developed techniques such as structured prompt templates and few-shot prompting. The head-to-head comparison with a non-sensor-informed agent across five use scenarios demonstrates that this sensor-in-the-loop design can effectively improve users' needs and their overall experience. The deep-dive into agents' replies and participants' feedback further reveals that sensor-in-the-loop agents not only provide more contextually relevant responses but also exhibit a better understanding of user priorities and situational nuances. In addition, we conduct two case studies to examine the potential pitfalls and distill key insights from this sensor-in-the-loop agent. We hope this work can spawn new ideas for building more intelligent, empathetic, and effective AI-driven personal assistants.