Commentary I am your Smartphone and I Know you are about to Smoke: the application of mobile Sensing and Computing approaches to Smoking research and treatment

abStraCt Much is known about the immediate and predictive antecedents of smoking lapse, which include situations (e.g., presence of other smokers), activities (e.g., alcohol consumption), and contexts (e.g., outside). This commentary suggests smartphone-based systems could be used to infer these predictive antecedents in real time and provide the smoker with just-in-time intervention. The smartphone of today is equipped with an array of sensors, including GPS, cameras, light sensors, barometers, accelerometers, and so forth, that provide information regarding physical location, human movement, ambient sounds, and visual imagery. We propose that libraries of algorithms to infer these antecedents can be developed and then incorporated into diverse mobile research and personalized treatment applications. While a number of challenges to the development and implementation of such applications are recognized, our field benefits from a database of known antecedents to a problem behavior, and further research and development in this exciting area are warranted

Combined smoking cues enhance cue-induced craving and smoking behavior, and predict immediate subsequent smoking

Introduction Cue reactivity (CR) research has reliably demonstrated robust cue-induced responding among smokers exposed to common proximal smoking cues (eg, cigarettes, lighter). More recent work demonstrates that distal stimuli, most notably the actual environments in which smoking previously occurred, can also gain associative control over craving. In the real world, proximal cues always occur within an environment; thus, a more informative test of how cues affect smokers might be to present these two cue types simultaneously. Methods Using a combined-cue counterbalanced CR paradigm, the present study tested the impact of proximal (smoking and neutral) + personal environment (smoking and nonsmoking places) pictorial cues, on smokers’ subjective and behavioral CR; as well as the extent to which cue-induced craving predicts immediate subsequent smoking in a within-subjects design. Results As anticipated, the dual smoking cue combination (ProxS + EnvS) led to the greatest cue-induced craving relative to the other three cue combinations (ProxS + EnvN, ProxN + EnvS, and ProxN ± EnvN), ps \u3c .004. Dual smoking cues also led to significantly shorter post-trial latencies to smoke, ps \u3c .01. Overall CR difference score (post-trial craving minus baseline craving) was predictive of subsequent immediate smoking indexed by: post-trial latency to smoke [B = −2.69, SE = 9.02; t(143) = −2.98, p = .003]; total puff volume [B = 2.99, SE = 1.13; t(143) = 2.65, p = .009]; and total number of puffs [B = .053, SE = .027; t(143) = 1.95, p = .05]. Conclusions The implications of these findings for better understanding the impact of cues on smoking behavior and cessation are discussed. Implications This novel cue reactivity study examined smokers’ reactivity to combined proximal and distal smoking cues. Exposure to a combination of two smoking cues (proximal and environment) led to the greatest increases in cue-induced craving and smoking behavior compared to all other cue combinations. Further, the overall magnitude of cue-induced craving was found to significantly predict immediate subsequent smoking. This work provides new insight on how exposure to various cues and cue combinations directly affect smokers’ craving and actual smoking behavior, as well as the relationship between those two indices of reactivity