There are a lot of people who want to quit smoking but find it really hard. To help such people, British researchers have developed a stop-smoking mobile app. According to the report, the app is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The app senses where and when people might be triggered to light up and could help the quit smoking.
The app — Quit Sense — has been developed by researchers of the University of East Anglia. This is the world’s first such app that is based on Artificial Intelligence. The app detects the urge of smoking and then provides support to help manage their specific smoking triggers in that location.
The team of researchers are of the view that the app will help people manage trigger situations and in this way make more smokers quit.
“All the attempts to quit smoking often fail because urges to smoke are triggered when people spend more time in places where they used to smoke. This can be in places like the pub or at work. The only way to provide support to such people to help manage these types of situations and urges as they happen is medication,” said lead researcher Prof Felix Naughton, from UEA’s School of Health Sciences.
Smartphone-based app works with the help of artificial intelligence
“Quit Sense is a smartphone-based app that works with the help of artificial intelligence. The app uses AI and learns about the times, locations and triggers of previous smoking events to decide when and what messages to display to the users to help them manage urges to smoke in real-time,” added Dr. Chloe Siegele-Brown from the University of Cambridge, who built the app.
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In order to conduct the trial, the team of researchers involved 209 smokers. According to the researcher, these people were recruited via social media. They were sent links by text message to access their allocated treatment — all participants received a link to NHS online stop-smoking support, but only half received the Quit Sense app in addition.
Six months later, all these people were asked to complete follow-up measures online. Those people, out of 209 smokers, who quit smoking were asked to mail back a saliva sample to verify their abstinence.
The findings, published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, showed that people who were offered the app quit smoking four times more, after six months, compared to those only offered online NHS support.