Smartwatch-based intervention to help prevent smoking relapse
An intervention which uses a smartwatch to detect smoking and deliver cessation support messages at the point of smoking lapse, to prevent full relapse to smoking.
Team: Chris Stone, Angela Attwood, Marcus Munafo, Andy Skinner and collaborators from the University of Southampton and the University of East Anglia
Overview: Stopping smoking brings several health benefits, some relatively quickly and others more sustained as smoking cessation continues. But quitting is notoriously difficult, and many have tried all sorts of ways to stop smoking, with limited success. We need to find innovative methods of helping smokers quit, that can be proven to be effective.
For those who are trying to give up, an initial lapse is likely to lead to a full relapse to smoking. Therefore, if we can identify this point of lapse, and deliver an intervention at that point, we have an opportunity to improve the success of the quit attempt.
With the help of public-patient involvement, we’ve developed a system that uses the motion sensors in a smartwatch to identify hand movements which have the characteristic signature of cigarette smoking, and we’ve validated this system with smokers in free-living conditions using commercially-available smartwatches. We can use this wearable system to detect when a smoking lapse takes place. Then, using the messaging capabilities of the smartwatch, we can automatically deliver a relapse prevention intervention to the patient, tailored to their circumstances, just at the moment it is needed. We call this a “just-in-time adaptive intervention”.
We’ve now tested the feasibility of this intervention, as part of the Integrative Cancer Epidemiology Programme here in Bristol, and the results indicate that the intervention, and the use of a smartwatch to deliver it, is feasible and acceptable to users. The next stage (which will be dependent on further funding) is to carry out larger-scale testing to assess how effective the intervention is for helping smokers to quit.
Funding: This work was supported by Cancer Research UK as part of the Integrative Cancer Epidemiology Programme, and the Medical Research Council as part of the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit; both programmes based at the University of Bristol.