Bored with using nicotine patches to quell cigarette cravings? A recent mobile app can do this for you by targeting the psychological triggers, which make you must light up.
The study, published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, noted that the app outweighed online support services when it comes to success rate.
The research team hopes it can profit more people by helping them understand their smoking triggers and quit the habit once and for all.
“We all know that quit attempts often fail because urges to smoke are triggered by spending time in places where people used to smoke. This could be while on the pub or at work, for instance. Apart from using medication, there aren’t any existing ways of providing support to assist smokers manage these kind of situations and urges as they occur,” lead researcher Prof Felix Naughton, from UEA’s School of Health Sciences, said within the study, in accordance with Medical Express.
The app’s founding father, Dr. Chloë Siegele-Brown from the University of Cambridge, defined Quit Sense as “an AI smartphone app that learns concerning the times, locations and triggers of previous smoking events to choose when and what messages to display to the users to assist them manage urges to smoke in real time.”
“Helping people attempting to quit smoking to study and manage these situations is a recent way of accelerating a smoker’s possibilities of quitting successfully.”
Within the groundbreaking study, 209 smokers were randomly chosen for a trial geared toward helping them to quit smoking. As a part of the trial, they were sent texts with links to their allocated treatment. All participants got U.K.’s NHS online stop-smoking support, but only half received the Quit Sense app as well as.
They were watched over for six months, after which made to finish follow-up surveys online. Those that reported quitting were asked to send their saliva samples for confirmation.
Naughton said the brand new technology-based intervention proficiently supported smokers of their journey to dismiss the habit.
“We found that when smokers were offered the Quit Sense app, three-quarters installed it and those that began a quit attempt with the app used it for around one month on average. We also found that 4 times more individuals who were offered the app quit smoking six months later in comparison with those only offered online NHS support,” Naughton said.
Attempt to quit smoking because the chemicals present in cigarettes are harmful to the body.
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