Tracking smoking habits

Tracking smoking habits is a currently on-going self-research/tracking project by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras that combines manual tracking through a Flic button and automation through IFTTT to record the data and deliver feedback.

Project Infobox
Self researcher(s)	User:Gedankenstuecke
Related tools	Flic button, IFTTT, Spreadsheets, One Button Tracker
Related topics	Habits
Builds on project(s)
Has inspired	Projects (0)

Background

I've been trying to quit smoking on and off, with temporary but ultimately limited success. I thought having some more qualitative data on how much smoke might help me to a) identify the extend of my smoking habit and potentially also find some triggers/situations in which I smoke and b) ultimately figure out a way to deliver feedback to help me stop. This project was partially inspired by a reddit post regarding using Flic buttons as a one-button tracker.

Initial setup, protocol and baseline collection

The Google Sheet into which data is written automatically. Geolocation for the first data points is empty as location permissions weren't set correctly.

Before starting on any interventions or even providing feedback, I wanted to collect some baseline data on how much I smoke and when. For this I connected my Flic button to my phone and set it up to trigger an IFTTT trigger every time the button was pressed. IFTTT in turn would write the button presses into a Google Sheet to collect the data. In total I decided to collect 3 types of data:

1. Type of click, the Flic supports regular clicks, double clicks as well as recording holding the button
2. My geolocation, as provided by my phone
3. and most importantly: The date & time the button was pressed

Establishing a baseline from 34 days of data. Plotted as a time series as well as a distribution through a joint violin/boxplot, both for all days and split into weekdays/weekends.

I then used a little clip to attach the Flic button to my pack of cigarettes, which made for an easy protocol: Every time I'd take out a cigarette and smoke, I'd press the Flic button to record the location and timestamp data.

Refining the protocol

Within the first two days it became clear that relying on regular presses of the button would result in recording false-positives: As the button spends a lot of time within the pockets of my trousers, it is prone to accidental short presses or long presses because of other stuff that bumps around in the pocket. Luckily, doing a double press requires a more deliberate action and seemed unlikely to be generated by accident, so I adapted my protocol to only record actual data by doing double clicks.

Getting the baseline data

I started the data collection on July 13th, 2022 and continued to do the recording protocol until August 16, 2022, giving me a good month worth of baseline data. During this time I did not look at the data beyond spot-checks to make sure the data collection still worked (i.e. no plotting/reasoning about the data during this period).

The baseline more or less confirmed my initial gut feeling regarding my smoking frequency: I had expected it to be an average of around 10 cigarettes a day, and over the baseline it came out at 8.6 which is slightly lower than guess was.