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Tobacco use remains a leading cause of death and disease in California. Young adults smoke in high numbers and are interested in quitting, but they are less likely to use effective smoking cessation services. Smartphones are widely used among this group and offer a promising strategy to deliver smoking cessation interventions to a large, diverse audience of young adult smokers. Smoking cessation applications for smartphones are rarely based on proven and effective smoking cessation interventions. Further, only a few of these applications deliver customized content to meet the specific needs of each individual smoker. Little is known about how smartphone-based interventions need to be designed, and what kind of custom-made content they should deliver. One especially promising strategy is to target situations that elicit smoking urges. Urges are important triggers for smoking, so it is important for smoking cessation messages to help young adults cope with these urges.
The applicant has experience conducting smartphone-based studies to investigate real-world triggers for smoking among young adults and he has worked on smoking cessation interventions for young people using in-person counseling and social media. He aims to combine these lines of research to develop new smartphone-based interventions for smoking cessation. His career plan includes training in human centered design to develop smartphone messages, conducting mobile health (mHealth, i.e. using mobile devices for health care) intervention studies, basics in machine learning and predictive modeling, and to expand his skills in quantitative and qualitative research methods.
The UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education provides an exceptional environment for developing tobacco investigators. The primary mentor, Dr. Pamela Ling, is an expert in tobacco research with young adults, and the other members of the mentoring and advisory team provide additional expertise in smoking cessation, mHealth methods for health behavior change, intervention development, and mHealth trial design. The overall goal of the proposed research is to develop and pilot test messages to reduce smoking urges among young adult smokers.
The specific aims are: Aim 1) Describe situational triggers for smoking for young adults by analyzing real-time data from 150 young adult smokers collected in smartphone assessments. The applicant is currently conducting this study and he will analyze the data to determine the most important situational triggers for smoking among young adults. Aim 2.1) Develop and design smartphone-based smoking cessation messages for young adults based on the US Clinical Practice Guidelines for smoking cessation and informed by a social media smoking cessation intervention the applicant has conducted. Further (Aim 2.2), to demonstrate acceptability and understanding of the intervention messages among the target audience through focus groups with 20 participants. Aim 3) Usability test the intervention with 20 young adult smokers in a 30-day micro-randomized pilot trial. In this novel type of trial, each participant receives multiple intervention messages over time. Intervention messages of three randomly selected types (matched to situation, mismatched to situation, or control) will be delivered to each participant’s smartphone 3 times per day. Messages may be matched to situations where participants report strong urges to smoke, or to locations (based on phone geolocation data) where smoking occurs. An existing software platform will be used for the smartphone-based interventions. The pilot trial will examine ease of participant recruitment, how well participants comply with study procedures, how well the matching of intervention messages works, how useful participants find the intervention messages, and will provide initial data on how effective the matched messages work for reducing urges.
Results of this study will generate important pilot data for a future proposal to conduct a larger trial to determine how effective the developed intervention messages are for decreasing smoking urges and smoking behavior. |
