This new Smart Necklace "SmokeMon" helps you to Stop Smoking

Things are getting smart and crazy enough with some potentially helping people in day-to-day lives. Likely as smart tattoos, smart underwear, and other smart techs, here is a smart necklace that helps smokers to get rid of the habit.

The deadly smoking habit had affected millions causing cancer, heart disease, diabetes and more, all for a moment of relief people feel from that. According to WHO’s report, Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year, with 7 million deaths directly related to the effect. Though many are into the habit, a healthy number of smokers want to quit the harmful habit.

Quitting smoking is not as easy as it sounds. I remember Chandler’s situations of smoking and how Monica convinced him to escape from it. Well, not everyone could afford Monica, but they could try this new wearable smart necklace that detects when you start smoking, collects data and report them to help medical experts offer better care and cut down on the chances of a relapse.

SmokeMon

The smart necklace called “SmokeMon”, being worn on the neck can “capture spatial, temporal and thermal information around the wearer and cigarette all day to unobtrusively and passively detect smoking events”, says researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Aimed for tracking the activity of a person who wishes to quit smoking, SmokeMon help people to not relapse (going back to smoking regularly), which happens frequently in people who quit or try to.

SmokeMon tracks not visuals, but heat and it goes way beyond than tracking how many cigarettes a person smokes per day. The smart necklace can detect when the cigarette is being lit, when the person holds it to their mouth and takes a puff, how much they inhale, how much time between puffs and how long they have the cigarette in their mouth. Researchers call all these details as “smoking topography”.

Smoking Topography

Smoking topography allows scientists to measure and assess harmful carbon monoxide exposure among smokers and understand more deeply the relationship between chemical exposure and tobacco-related diseases including cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease, diabetes, COPD, emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

Say a former smoker takes a few puffs of a cigarette. Do five puffs or five entire cigarettes send them into a full relapse? This information can be used to predict when a person will relapse and when to intervene with a phone call from a health coach, for example, or even a smartphone text or video message to help encourage them to prevent a relapse. The scientists also plan to study the effectiveness of the device in detecting smoking puffs and topography from electronic cigarettes.

“We want to catch them before they completely fall off the wagon,” Alshurafa said. “Once they do, it’s much harder for them to quit again.

SmokeMon lasts for a whole day

SmokeMon comes equipped with a 500mAh battery that can last for 19 hours on a single charge, which means it would easily last a full day of tracking. It is one of the first devices of its kind that use thermal imagery to identify smoking episodes without causing any privacy concerns that come with a regular RGB camera sensor embedded in a sensor for activity tracking. Plus, the chances of false positives are low, since it does not rely on hand or body movements.

The study establishing the accuracy of the device and people’s willingness to wear it was published on Feb. 13 in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies.

“Now we can begin to test the effectiveness of this device in improving the success rate of smoking cessation programs by preventing relapse in smokers who are planning to quit,” Alshurafa said. “We will be able to test whether real-time feedback and interventions can be more effective than usual care.

(For more such interesting informational, technology and innovation stuffs, keep reading The Inner Detail).