A necklace that can help you in quitting smoking is developed and on its way to reach you very soon. Northwestern Medicine researchers created a smart neck-worn gadget that looks like a lapis blue pendant and detects smoking significantly more reliably than prior systems. It accomplishes this by collecting heat signatures from thermal sensors.
The necklace, called SmokeMon, completely maintains a smoker›s privacy, only tracking heat, not visuals — which is a critical factor for people to feel comfortable wearing it. «This goes way beyond how many cigarettes a person smokes per day,» said senior investigator Nabil Alshurafa, associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We can detect when the cigarette is being lit, when the person holds it to their mouth and takes a puff, how much they inhale, how much time between puffs and how long they have the cigarette in their mouth.”
All these details are called smoking topography, which is essential for two reasons. The first is that it allows scientists to measure and assess harmful carbon monoxide exposure among smokers and understand more deeply the relationship between chemical exposure and tobacco-related diseases including cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease, diabetes, COPD, emphysema and chronic bronchitis