A Feasibility Study of Wrist-Worn Accelerometer Based Detection of Smoking Habits

Cigarette smoking is one of the major causes of lung cancer, and has been linked to a large amount of other cancer types and diseases. Smoking cessation, the only mean to avoid these serious risks, is hindered by the ease to ignore these risks in day-to-day life. In this paper we present a feasibility study with smokers wearing an accelerometer device on their wrist over the course of a week to detect their smoking habits based on detecting typical gestures carried out while smoking a cigarette. We provide a basic detection method that identifies when the user is smoking, with the goal of building a system that provides an individualized risk estimation to increase awareness and motivate smoke cessation. Our basic method detects typical smoking gestures with a precision of 51.2% and shows a user-specific recall of over 70% - creating evidence that an unobtrusive wrist-watch-like sensor can detect smoking.