When do you light a fire?: capturing tobacco use with situated, wearable sensors

ABSTRACTAn important step towards assessing smoking behavior is to detect and log smoking episodes in an unobtrusive way. Detailed information on an individual's consumption can then be used to highlight potential health risks and behavioral statistics to increase the smoker's awareness, and might be applied in smoking cessation programs. In this paper, we present an evaluation of two different monitoring prototypes which detect a user's smoking behavior, based on augmenting a lighter. Both prototypes capture and record instances when the user smokes, and are sufficiently robust and power efficient to allow deployments of several weeks. A real-world feasibility study with 11 frequently-smoking participants investigates the deployment and adoption of the system, hinting that smokers are generally unaware of their daily smoking patterns, and tend to overestimate their consumption.