Currently accepted at: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: May 22, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: May 26, 2026 - Jul 21, 2026
Date Accepted: Nov 5, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
This paper has been accepted and is currently in production.
It will appear shortly on 10.2196/102166
The final accepted version (not copyedited yet) is in this tab.
Vibe Coding as a Participatory Approach to Co-Designing Smoking Cessation Supports with People with Lived and Living Experience: Protocol for a Participatory Qualitative Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Co-designed with people who have lived and living experience (PWLLE) of the target issue is widely recommended for developing behavioral interventions. However, traditional co-design processes position participants as idea generators whose concepts must be translated into functional tools by professional developers, creating a gap between participant vision and final product. The emergence of vibe coding, a practice in which users describe desired software functionality in natural language and artificial intelligence (AI) generates the corresponding code may offer an opportunity to close this gap by enabling participants to build their own intervention tools themselves.
Objective:
To integrate vibe coding into the co-design of behavioral interventions in SmokeFreeConnect project, aimed to support smoking cessation and to explore how people who smoke and want to quit or reduce smoking translate their cessation needs into app features using an AI-assisted prototyping tool.
Methods:
Adults (18 years and above) who are current or recent users of commercial tobacco and want to quit or reduce will be invited to attend in-person group sessions at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where they would build a prototype app with AI-assisted development tool (Base44) based on their smoking cessation needs. The session will include an initial group discussion, small-group brainstorming, guided prompt drafting, hands-on prototyping in Base44 using natural-language prompts, and a group debrief. Data sources will include audio recordings, prompts and AI conversation logs, prototypes, and worksheets. Data will be analyzed using the deductive thematic analysis codes.
Results:
Ethical approval was obtained in August 2025. Recruitment for the vibe coding sessions will begin in November 2026 and results are expected to be submitted for publication in 2028.
Conclusions:
This protocol describes vibe coding incorporation as an extension to participatory co-design method in SmokeFreeConnect project to identify how people will use AI-tools to build smoking cessation supports for themselves. The sessions are expected to show what participants need, which features they choose, and how they experience the approach, and to further inform SmokeFreeConnect supports.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.