Puff Packet: A Platform for Unobtrusively Tracking the Fine-grained Consumption Patterns of E-cigarette Users

The proliferation of e-cigarettes and portable vaporizers presents new opportunities for accurately and unobtrusively tracking e-cigarette use. PuffPacket is a hardware and software research platform that leverages the technology built into vaporizers, e-cigarettes and other electronic drug delivery devices to ubiquitously track their usage. The system piggybacks on the signals these devices use to directly measure and track the nicotine consumed by users. PuffPacket augments e-cigarettes with Bluetooth to calculate the frequency, intensity, and duration of each inhalation. This information is augmented with smartphone-based location and activity information to help identify potential contextual triggers. PuffPacket is generalizable to a wide variety of electronic nicotine, THC, and other drug delivery devices currently on the market. The hardware and software for PuffPacket is open-source so it can be expanded upon and leveraged for mobile health tracking research.