Researchers from Cornell University have created a device that attaches to e-cigarettes and monitors inhalations to help curb use.
The device, named PuffPacket, gathers information about when and where people vape, how deeply they inhale and how much nicotine they consume and it easily attaches to most e-cigarettes and nicotine delivery kits. It helps to fill the gaps about vaping that may help curtail use and help people identify triggers that cause them to vape.
It is harder to track vape usage than traditional cigarettes because there is no pack of cigarettes to keep track of how many a person has smoked. PuffPacket helps researchers understand the forces impacting drug cravings and addictive behavior and create interventions.
The team developed three versions of PuffPacket with a range of attributes, like the ease of attachment and long battery life. It uses the e-cig’s signals and Bluetooth to track intensity, duration and inhalation frequency and circumstances that are triggering vape use. The gathered data is transmitted to a smartphone that captures location, time and current activity, such as walking, standing and driving.
Correlations between time of day, place and activity are important to understanding addiction. Keeping people away from their normal habits is helpful in curbing bad habits, such as vaping. If someone skips or delays their first morning vape, it can be critical to determining if they smoke less through the day.
The team wanted to make PuffPacket as cheap and easy to use as possible. Attaching PuffPacket to a vape device and synching it with cell phones can deliver accurate results more than approaches that require people to record their habits manually.
The team released an open source design for PuffPacket for other researchers to use. A paper on the device was published in CHI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
