When do you light a fire?: capturing tobacco use with situated wearable sensors

Abstract

The World Health Organization calls tobacco use the single most preventable cause of premature death, presenting both a personal health risk and an increased load on public healthcare systems. However, smoking cessation is often hindered by the low perceivability of health risks and unawareness of habits in day-to-day life, and effective smoking cessation systems, besides personal counseling, are still to be improved. This demo presents the design and implementation of two instrumented lighters that can be used to track a smokers' personal consumption habits. A Gas lighter and a USB lighter which have been outfitted with a micro-controller, storage unit and real-time clock. Both lighters store the day-of-time whenever they are used to light up a cigarette. This information can later be retrieved by the user for personal consumption statistics like most common time-of-day of consumption, total number of smoked cigarettes, daily consumed cigarettes etc. The presented prototypes allow the continous tracking of smoking behaviour over the course of several days.