Substance Use Disorder

Area Members: Yiyang (Diana) Wang, Sheraz Hassan, Rishabh Goel

PuffPacket

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 (https://github.com/PuffPacket/PuffPacket) so it can be expanded upon and leveraged for mobile health tracking research.

Keppi

Motivated by the need to support those managing chronic pain, we report on the iterative design, development, and evaluation of Keppi, a novel pressure-based tangible user interface (TUI) for the self-report of pain intensity. In-lab studies with 28 participants found individuals were able to use Keppi to reliably report low, medium, and high pain as well as map squeeze pressure to pain level. Based on insights from these evaluations, we ultimately created a wearable version of Keppi with multiple form factors, including a necklace, bracelet, and keychain. Interviews indicated high receptivity to the wearable design, which satisfied additional user-identified needs (e.g., discreet and convenient) and highlighted key directions for the continued refinement of tangible devices for pain assessment.

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