QuittyLink:Using Smartphones for Personal Counseling to Help People Quit Smoking

We present the design and evaluation of a smartphone app, QuittyLink, designed to help smokers reduce or stop smoking. Smoking cigarettes is a serious health risk and people who wish to quit often struggle to do so. It is well known that the most effective method of assisting smoking cessation is personal face-to-face counseling. However, this approach is only used by very few people wishing to quit for reasons such as inconvenience and personal shyness. In response to this we have created an app that provides personal counseling to users on their smartphone. The counseling content is authored by smoking cessation experts and is based on the user’s personal data and recent actual smoking behaviors collected through the smartphone. We deployed the QuittyLink app with people in their everyday lives to study how personal counseling on mobile phones would influence their smoking behaviors. We found that both the personal counseling and the ability to visualize and reflect on their own self-tracked smoking behaviors helped them form strategies to improve their ability to quit. Author Keywords Smoking cessation; health behavior change; mobile apps; personal counseling; self-tracking; interaction design. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)

Quitty: Using technology to persuade smokers to quit

Health is an important topic in HCI research with an increasing amount of health risks surrounding individuals and society at large. It is well known that smoking cigarettes can have serious health implications. The importance of this problem motivates investigation into the use of technology to encourage behavior change. Our study was designed to gather empirical knowledge about the role a "quitting app" can play in persuading people to quit smoking. Our purpose-built app Quitty introduces different content types from different content sources to study how they are perceived and motivate health behavior change. Findings from our field study show that tailored content and push-messages are considered the most important for persuading people to stop smoking. Based on our empirical findings, we propose six guidelines on how to design mobile applications to persuade smokers to quit