Project DEDUCE: Digital Envirotyping to Develop Understanding of Cigarette Smoking and the Environment

Study Summary

Tobacco use is a chronic relapsing condition. That is, even with state-of-the-art treatment, \>70% of smoking cessation attempts end in a return to regular smoking. Research demonstrates that everyday environments associated with smoking trigger craving for cigarettes, provoke smoking, and lead to relapse. However, despite this knowledge, understanding of environmental correlates of smoking has been limited by a reliance on self-report, leading to imprecise information about the physical environments in which people live. To overcome this challenge, the research team has pioneered the development of digital envirotyping, which uses digital tools (e.g., sensors, cameras, artificial intelligence) to efficiently and accurately characterize and categorize environments with the goal of identifying environmental markers of behavior and health. Foundational to the digital envirotyping research is computer vision (CV), a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computer systems to recognize objects and scenes in digital images, mimicking how humans perceive and understand visual information. With CV researchers can extract detailed and accurate information (i.e., objects and location types) about the everyday environments of people who smoke (PWS) and relate that information to smoking behavior. After validating the use of CV, the researchers used CV to develop enviromarkers of relapse risk. Importantly, they identified a novel enviromarker in which people at greater risk for relapse when they quit are exposed to a more consistent level of environment-related smoking risk as they move between their smoking and nonsmoking environments. Research is now needed to advance digital envirotyping and enviromarker development in the field of tobacco addiction. The study will recruit a diverse, national sample of n=500 adults who are interested in quitting smoking. For two weeks prior to quitting, they will undergo photoEMA in which they will take two pictures of their curr

Primary Outcome

Participants will self-report smoking from quit date to the 6-month follow-up visit. Days to relapse will be defined as the first of seven consecutive days of smoking.

Interventions

• DRUG transdermal nicotine replacement therapy