Presenter: Dr. Santosh Kumar

Presented: January 19, 2016

About the presentation: In the webinar, Dr. Kumar describes the puffMarker model for pinpointing the timing of a first lapse in a quitting smoker. The recent research has demonstrated the feasibility of detecting smoking from wearable sensors, but their performance on real-life smoking lapse detection is unknown.

In a paper presented at UbiComp ’15, MD2K researchers (lead author Nazir Saleheen) proposed a new model and evaluated its performance on 61 newly abstinent smokers. The trial used two wearable sensors — breathing pattern from respiration and arm movements from 6-axis inertial sensors worn on wrists. In 10-fold cross-validation on 40 hours of training data from 6 daily smokers, the puffMarker model achieved a recall rate of 96.9%, for a false positive rate of 1.1%. When applied to 3 days of post-quit data from 32 lapsers, the model correctly pinpointed the timing of the first lapse in 28 participants. Only 2 false episodes were detected on 20 abstinent days of these participants. When tested on 84 abstinent days from 28 abstainers, the false episode per day was limited to 1/6. The puffMarker model is being incorporated in the MD2K mobile phone software scheduled to be released in Spring 2016 for real-time detection of smoking lapse on a mobile phone.

About the presenter: Dr. Kumar is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2006, where his dissertation won a presidential fellowship. In 2010, the Popular Science magazine named him one of America’s ten most brilliant scientists under the age of 38 (called “Brilliant Ten”). In 2011, he chaired the “mHealth Evidence” meeting jointly organized by NIH, NSF, RWJF, and McKesson Foundation to establish evidence requirements for mHealth. In 2013, he was invited to meet with the NIH Director to advise him on NIH efforts in the area of mHealth and was invited to the White House to give a talk on the future of Biosensors. In 2014, he co-organized and co-chaired the NSF-NIH Workshop on Computing Challenges in Future Mobile Health (mHealth) Systems and Applications.  More about Dr. Kumar.

Go here to read the paper ahead of the presentation.