2023-04-24 08:00:00
Whether it’s during the break in the office, tipsy at a party, waiting at the bus stop or simply out of habit after a meal: many people reach for a cigarette, especially when the social pressure is high or a routine has set in. Such trigger situations are particularly challenging for people who want to quit smoking when they have to fight the inner urge. A new app could help them with this, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically recognize the relevant situations and intervene to support them.
“We know that trying to quit smoking often fails because the urge to smoke is triggered by being in places where you used to smoke,” says Felix Naughton, a health psychologist at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. He and a team developed the “Quit Sense” smartphone app, which was reviewed by independent experts The study was presented in the specialist magazine “Nicotine & Tobacco Research”.
Quit Sense is an app that addresses the still comparatively new psychological principle of Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI) makes use of. This is what interventions are called that are intended to enable tailor-made support in trigger situations. This is possible because JITAIs access real-time data to draw conclusions about a person’s emotional, social and physical condition. In combination with artificial intelligence, the interventions can be even more targeted.
AI learns smoking behavior
In the case of Quit Sense, users first have to train the AI with their personal smoking behavior. Whenever they light a cigarette, they have to make a note of it in the app, including clues about their mood (“stressed”) and context (“at work”). The app also uses GPS to record the respective location in the background. Within a few days, the AI learns which places and situations may tempt users to smoke.
If users then state in the app that they want to stop smoking, they are warned whenever a suspected trigger is imminent. The app then responds with supportive messages and contextual queries, intended to alert users to the situation without being intrusive or annoying.
To test the effectiveness of the procedure, the team conducted a controlled study with 209 smokers recruited via social media. All participants received a link to a NHS smoking cessation project. Half of the subjects also received access to the Quit Sense app.
Quit Sense, the AI-assisted smoking cessation app, recognizes when people enter a place where they used to smoke.
(Bild: University of East Anglia)
Tailor-made intervention via app
After six weeks and six months, the scientists asked the subjects to report on their experiences. Anyone who indicated that they had stopped smoking in the meantime were asked to give a saliva sample to confirm their abstinence. Although not all did so, the result seems to speak for itself: four times as many people who had access to Quit Sense quit smoking compared to those who only used NHS support. The tailored and timely intervention apparently worked.
For Felix Naughton, this is proof of how smartphone technology and machine learning can be successfully used for interventions in medicine and psychology: “By helping people who are trying to quit smoking to learn and cope with these situations, we can increase the success rate,” he says.
(jl)
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