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.