Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Dec 6, 2023
Date Accepted: Aug 26, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Smartphone App (MO) to Provide Tailored and Comprehensive Support for Smoking Cessation: A Pilot Multi-Cohort Study to Evaluate Acceptability, Usability, and Effectiveness
ABSTRACT
Background:
Despite the growing availability of smoking cessation apps, low engagement and cessation rates have remained a significant challenge. To address this issue, we employed a user-centered design to iteratively develop a mobile app (MO) to provide comprehensive, tailored, and evidence-based content to support smokers in their quitting journey.
Objective:
This study examines the acceptability, usability, and preliminary efficacy of the MO app for smoking cessation. Specifically, we sought to 1) understand smokers’ preferred features, engagement, and satisfaction with MO; 2) identify concerns in using the app and ways to improve the app; and 3) evaluate its smoking cessation outcomes.
Methods:
Methods:
Through three cohorts, we recruited 10, 12, and 85 adult smokers who attempted to quit smoking to pilot test the MO app. Participants’ app usage was tracked and analyzed. The primary outcome measures were participants’ 7-day point prevalence abstinence at 6 and 12 weeks.
Results:
Participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the MO app across all three cohorts, rating it between 4.40 and 4.76 on a scale of 5 for acceptability. Users engaged with app activities for an average of 89-159 times over 35 days. The overall quit rate of the modified intention to treat population in cohort three was 49.41% at 6 weeks and 47.06% at 12 weeks. Those who engaged more frequently with app features and completed a greater variety of activities were more likely to maintain abstinence. Participants who earned more than 5000 points during app use also had higher odds of quitting at both 6 weeks (OR = 3.12; 95% CI = 1.25 – 7.75) and 12 weeks (OR = 4.65; 95% CI = 1.83 – 11.76), compared to those who earned less than 5000 points.
Conclusions:
Our study demonstrated that MO is a feasible mobile phone app with high acceptability and usability and can effectively deliver smoking cessation support to individuals who want to quit. Implications for developing and evaluating mobile phone apps for smoking cessation are discussed.
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.