UB awarded $745,000 for a digital system to prevent e-cigarette use among adolescents

BUFFALO, N.Y. — University at Buffalo School of Nursing researcher Eunhee Park has received a $745,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop a digital system to prevent e-cigarette use among adolescents.

Park’s work centers on developing, implementing and disseminating effective interventions that reduce the harms of risky behaviors, particularly focusing on smoking and substance use prevention among young people with low SES.

Her latest grant — AI-Enhanced App-based Intervention for Adolescent E-Cigarette Cessation, for which she serves as principal investigator — aims to create a scalable, electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use cessation intervention using a smartphone application.

The project will address adolescent e-cigarette use, which Park, PhD, an assistant professor of nursing, says is an emerging public health problem.

In 2022, 14.1% of high school students and 3.3% of middle school students used e-cigarettes, according to her proposal, even though e-cigarette use is known to be “harmful to adolescent health, resulting in nicotine-related symptoms of addiction and various other health issues (e.g., depressive symptoms), and is associated with use of other addictive substances.”

Thus, Park says, effective and sustainable interventions to address adolescent e-cigarette use are urgently needed.

Park’s study aims to create a targeted e-cigarette use cessation intervention using a smartphone app, which can be delivered to a large pool of adolescents.

Timely messages will be sent in response to users’ urges to use e-cigarettes based on self-report in real time through the smartphone app. In addition, AI will be able to answer the users’ questions using an automated chatbot.

“We will examine the usability of the intervention based on user experiences of functions, interface, content, frequency of app use and minutes of app use,” Park says. “Then, we will pilot-test the intervention for summative evaluation using a quasi-randomized controlled study using a delayed intervention design.

“Over the long term, the findings of this study will contribute useful information for those testing the effectiveness of smartphone app-based interventions for adolescent e-cigarette use cessation on a large scale.”