MoLight

MoLight is a smart digital lighter with a built-in display that shows you of how many cigarettes you’ve smoked, provides you the motivation you need in the form of audio motivational messages from the speaker output embedded. MoLight also syncs with a mobile app via bluetooth to view smoking history, see progress, connect with the community of people that are on the same path as you.

So that you never feel alone in this fight!

Motivation:

I came up with the idea of studying the intent of smokers and devising a solution for it after an experience with a close friend. His father passed away recently due to lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker, and so is my friend. After seeing what his father had to go through, he decided to give up smoking and reached out to me for help. It was then that I started looking up and got interested in the topic.

How does the MoLight Lighter Work?

The MoLight lighter lights cigarettes using a heating element, similar to car lighters. The electronics count each cigarette that is lit. The display on the MoLight shows details about your smoking habits, like how many cigarettes you’ve smoked. We’ve built some smarts into the MoLight to keep track of your flicking, whether it's motivational message you heard or cigarettes you lit.

MoLight is designed to empower you.

Quitting smoking can be a long journey. Keeping track of your progress along the way helps keep you from getting lost. Use the MoLight system to learn about your habits like never before and celebrate your achievements as you build new ones.

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Know your smoking.

Learn at what times of the day you’re smoking most and cut out the ones you don’t really need. You can share your progress with MoLight's community or with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Leverage the power of social networks to celebrate your progress.

This mobile application is the counterpart of the lighter. You can pair it up with the lighter, invite friends and family to support you, send motivational messages and track your progress.

The another essential feature of the app is the community support to people who are on the same journey to quit smoking. The quitter can view and set up a daily schedule of the cigarettes that he’s allowed to smoke. He can also adjust it later.

Well we talked about the lighter and lighter is the right time of intervention but we also have incentivizing in my hypothesis. The right kind of incentivizing is money for some people that’s what I have incorporated in the MoLight application. I have introduced money as an incentive which means quitter’s can earn money as a reward if they smoke less than the targeted number but also lose money if they do it more than that.

Having said that I am also aware as for many people this will not be the only thing that works. It will be combination of these things. The most glaring gaps that I noticed were motivation as well as personal support that I tried to incorporate but that doesn’t mean the problem is going to fix itself , people are still going to need nicotine patches and gums and they are still going to continue.

Testing

When my lighter was under production during the last week, I happened to have a friend over for a week during spring break. He did not want to quit smoking but I thought it’ll be a good experiment to test out the concept of supporter with him. So I decided to become his supporter and asked him to resist smoking for a week. I recorded his progress and emotional graph over the time as can be seen on the screen.

He was able to resist smoking until the last day when he had only one cigarette. He was relatively less anxious on day 1-2 in comparison to day 3-5 when he was quite heavily drawn towards smoking and I was trying really hard to divert his mind from the same and get him into other activities such as walk./run or a workout. This turned out to be a good and effective experiment and confirmed my research that other alternatives such as Nicotine Patches and Nicotine Gums need to be considered and are effective along with the support to help in this journey.

I wanted to continue this experiment in the consecutive week as well. So, I reached out to a friend of friend who is a potential tester and aligns with my target audience, as she is willing to quote smoking. She lives in brooklyn, couple of miles away from my place and we have been meeting daily. I handed over the prototyped version of MoLight to her and asked her to give it a try for a week. This was her journey for the week.

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Below is the persona and consolidated testing results for the second tester post a week’s experience. She is a young professional and intends to live a healthy lifestyle and so wants to cut down smoking. She also finds it to be expensive and would rather want to save that money.

Conclusion

From the results of testing, it is concluded that in case of people who are heavily inclined towards smoking would intend to use MoLight very frequently to get the flame and that might defeat the purpose. Whereas those are moderately affected can possibly control their urge and the lighter can prove to be an effective solution for them.

Future Prospects

The future prospects for MoLight includes research and solutioning to figure out ways to help and suggest activities to people to distract themselves when they have the urge to smoke and want to engage themselves somewhere else.

As an extension to the existing capability, I would want to build a feature that notifies supporter, if any, on every flick of the lighter to be able to help by say giving a call and help the quitter distract for the duration of the urge or anything that helps the same. Another feature would be to send reminders to supporters to record messages more often. Also to keep supporters engaged with the application, I would want to introduce a community for supporters.

The community support could be enhanced to enable people who are on the same journey to reach out and connect with each other better, understand what’s their mind. To add on to this, one quitter can act as a supporter for another quitter and help each other in the journey to quit smoking.