A smarter way to handle smoking woes , thankfully with IoT “Quitbit” adds years to your life
Quitbit’s founders were motivated by personal desires to quit smoking, and have documented their own use of the device on the company blog.
Quitbit is an electronic lighter that’s designed to empower reluctant smokers by providing data-driven feedback about their habit. It makes a note every time you use the flameless heating coil to light up, and shares the data by Bluetooth with your smartphone. A screen on the lighter itself displays basic info like progress toward a daily limit or time since the last cigarette, while a more detailed analysis is available in the companion app.
The app can identify the times of day when users are puffing the most, which could help identify trigger factors that make them more likely to smoke. It also reminds them how much money they’re saving by cutting back, and provides community support by connecting them to other users. They can even use the app to put restrictions on the Quitbit itself, so it will simply refuse to heat up at certain times or within a set interval of the last cigarette, and it can scale those restrictions up over time to enforce a customized quitting plan.
There’s no guarantee that this (or any) gadget will make a smoker’s next quit attempt successful, and there are plenty of evidence that medications and other treatments can help too. But anytime a taken-for-granted habit can be logged automatically and the data made visible to users, it creates the potential for a self-reinforcing cycle that can change behavior in a big way. As it says in Quitbit’s FAQ section: “If you can measure it, you can manage it.” Anecdotally, they claim that early tests helped users cut down their smoking habit by 30 percent in the first month.
Quitbit is a graduate of both Betaspring and HAXLR8R, and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that shipped to backers in the 2015 holiday season. Learn more in the video below.
Courtesy: http://postscapes.com/smart-smoking-reduction-lighter-quitbit
