JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

While there have been many technological advances in studying the neurobiological and clinical basis of tobacco use disorder and nicotine addiction, there have been relatively minor advances in technologies for monitoring, characterizing, and intervening to prevent smoking in real-time. Better understanding of real time smoking behavior can be helpful in numerous applications, including initiation of just-in-time interventions, without the burden and recall bias associated with self-report.

Objective:

The goal of this study is to test the validity of using a smartwatch to advance the study of temporal patterns and topographies of smoking in the controlled laboratory setting prior to its implementation in situ. Specifically, the aim is to compare smoking topography recorded by Automated Smoking PerceptIon and REcording (ASPIRE) on Smartwatch with the CReSS Pocket topography device, using video observation as the gold standard.

Methods:

Adult smokers (N=27) engaged in a video-recorded laboratory smoking task by using pocket CReSS while also wearing a Polar M600 smartwatch. An in-house software, ASPIRE, was used to record accelerometer data to identify the duration of puffs and inter-puff intervals (IPI). The recorded sessions from CReSS and ASPIRE were manually annotated to assess smoking topography. Agreement between CReSS-recorded and ASPIRE-recorded smoking behavior was compared and contrasted.

Results:

ASPIRE produced more consistent number of puffs and IPI durations relative to CReSS, when comparing both methods to visual puff count. In addition, CReSS recordings reported many implausible measurements such as puff duration and IPIs in the order of milliseconds. After filtering implausible data recorded from CReSS, ASPIRE and CReSS produced consistent results for puff duration (R2 = .79) and IPIs (R2 = .73).

Conclusions:

Agreement between ASPIRE and other indicators of smoking topography was high, suggesting that the use of ASPIRE is a viable method of passively characterizing smoking behavior. Moreover, ASPIRE was more accurate than CReSS for measuring puffs and IPIs. Results from this study provide the foundation for future utilization testing of ASPIRE to passively and accurately monitor and quantify smoking behavior in situ.