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- TRANSCRIPT-
JOHN WHYTE
Welcome, everyone. I'm Dr. John Whyte, the chief medical officer at WebMD, and you're watching Your Health on Tech. About 12% of Americans currently smoke. Although that's much better than a few years ago, that still represents 20 million people who are significantly increasing their risk for cancer, heart disease, and other health problems. It's estimated that cigarette smoking causes about 1 in 5 deaths. Smoking is addictive, so quitting strategies don't always work. They don't work for too long. So I've been wondering. You talk about AI for every health problem. What about its use in getting people to quit smoking?
My guest today has helped to develop a device called SmokeMon. You wear it around your neck, and it helps you quit smoking. Joining me is Dr. Nabil Alshurafa. He's Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern and Director of the University's Habits Lab. Nabil, thanks for joining me. It's nice to see you.
NABIL ALSHURAFA
Thank you for having me on the show.
JOHN WHYTE
We featured your device on WebMD and have been getting a lot of comments about it. I want you to talk about your study and what it showed.
NABIL ALSHURAFA
So thank you very much. John, as you mentioned, smoking, again, has been-- we've made a lot of strides in smoking cessation, right? We went from about 45% in the 1950s, or 1 in 2 smokers, to now about 12.5% in the US. However, we still notice that about 68% of smokers who want to quit, out of 68%, only about 10% actually succeed. And so my students and I wanted to work on building a system or device that can help people quit smoking. And so the first part of that is being able to accurately detect the smoking event itself, right, or the puff. And so this is where we set out to look at what devices exist out there.
And so we built this wearable necklace that uses thermal sensing to actually capture heat in the area. It's a thermal sensor array that's oriented towards the mouth. And it captures the heat that the body emits as well as the heat that the cigarette emits. And we taught it using machine learning how to be able to distinguish between smoking and other activities. And not only were we able to accurately detect smoking events, but we're able to capture smoking topography, so more fine-grained information, things like number of puffs, puff volume, the duration between puffs.
JOHN WHYTE
And the necklace is doing all of this. NABIL ALSHURAFA: And the necklace, yes.
JOHN WHYTE
The neck-- wow. Now, why not a wristband? Everyone's wearing some type of smartwatch. How did you think, hmm, I'm going to make it a necklace instead?
NABIL ALSHURAFA
That's a great question. And so there exists researchers out there that have tried using wearable wrist-worn sensors, including ourselves. And what we found is that using the embedded sensors in the wrist, such as the inertial measurement unit or the accelerometer, ultimately, it allows us to capture motion of the wrist, right? And so then we can capture gestures as the hand approaches the mouth. And we can begin to look at what gestures-- what a smoking gesture looks like versus other types of gestures, like food intake. And we found that using a wrist-worn device created a lot of false alarms, right? And so it wasn't able to accurately detect smoking puffs.
JOHN WHYTE
So why do you think this one, though, is working because you mentioned about ones for the wrist haven't worked. But also, people tried using eyeglasses with cameras to try to work. Whereas, this necklace seems to be working. What do you think is unique? Is it something about just the idea of wearing jewelry that doesn't feel as medicinal or clinical in nature? What's going on here?
NABIL ALSHURAFA
Yeah, and so when you think about the smoking habit or the smoking behavior, what's interesting is that the eyeglass is a possible solution as well. However, not everyone wears eyeglasses. So telling people that don't wear eyeglasses that they have to is a concern. And also wearing a necklace, not everyone does wear a necklace and especially not a heavy one. And so one concern we had is how can we make this as lightweight as possible, right, so that people can actually wear this and forget that they're wearing it? And this is what went into the engineering of the actual device, and thinking about the different components that go into it to make it lightweight and as seamless as possible and unobtrusive as possible.
JOHN WHYTE
So how does one utilize the data it's providing?
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[@TargetCancer]

Thanks for the video!