The Quitbit lighter tracks your smoking habits, encourages you to quit
It turns out that it isn’t just the steps you take throughout the day, the calories you consume or the workouts you squeeze into your schedule that the latest wave of new gadgets allow you to track, but get ready to be served up a lot of (potentially scary) insights about your smoking habits too.
The Quitbit is being dubbed the “first smart lighter” and allows you to track your smoking and set a series of reduction plans and goals. Like many other devices that are built to encourage you to change your bad habits, the idea behind the Quitbit is that if you see how much you actually smoke and can easily visualise your behaviour throughout the day, you’re more likely to make significant and long-lasting changes.
The lighter has a display on it, which shows you how many cigarettes you’ve smoked already today and how long it’s been since your last one. The lighter then teams up with the Quitbit app via Bluetooth, which then allows you to set reduction goals at a pace that suits you and serves up lots of interesting data about what could be triggering you to smoke and how much money you’ve saved by not smoking as much as you did the day before.
We love the idea behind Quitbit, and do think that visualising your bad habits is the first step in stopping them, but at the same time you need a certain amount of motivation too. As we’ve realised from trialling a range of new fitness and activity tracking gadgets, you can’t expect your tech to do everything for you, you have to be motivated yourself and want to stop smoking (or eating too much, or sitting around too much) for this to work. Although that may be obvious to some people, many are buying into these new tech products and expecting them to be a magic wand for all of their problems, when really they’re just a helping hand.
The team behind Quitbit has only just launched its Kickstarter page, but has already managed to raise an impressive $9,000, which is an encouraging first few days for the potentially life-saving device.
