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Smoke Free – ‘quit smoking’ app offers feedback on oral health

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A popular app designed to help smokers kick the habit has been updated with a mouth and gums health assessment feature to mark this month’s European Gum Awareness Day (12 May) and World No Tobacco Day (31 May).

According to figures from ASH, every year, around 100,000 smokers in the UK die from smoking-related causes, with two-thirds of current smokers wanting to quit but only about 30-40% attempting to in a given year.

The highly rated Smoke Free app is designed to help with the difficult first month, enabling quitters to watch their health improve, see how much money they’re saving and monitor cravings patterns.

Now, award-winning dentist James Goolnik has collaborated with the team behind the highly rated app to develop a new feature that shows how an ex smoker’s bad breath, gum health and teeth staining is improving.

The app has been downloaded more than one million times, is used 1.5 million times per month and is Healthline’s top smoking cessation app of 2015.

It also won best app at UCL’s Festival for Digital Health, and has been chosen as one of the Best New Apps in Apple’s app store.

Each morning, users are given a mission – a task designed to help them fall out of love with smoking, resist cravings and recast themselves as a proud non-smoker.

The missions were tested scientifically and found to increase the odds of quitting by more than 50% – as successfully as nicotine patches or gum.

The app’s popularity doesn’t just lie in the success of the missions. The easy-to-use dashboard shows key facts, such as how long the user has been smoke free and how much money they’ve saved. A cravings button allows cravings to be recorded as they happen, after which tips are provided on how to resist them.

Badges reward people for reaching ‘quit’ milestones and they can even specify treats to buy with the money saved, having rid themselves of this deathly habit.

The app is built on solid scientific foundations, with more than 20 different behaviour change techniques are packed into this easy-to-use tool that helps people through the hardest part of the quitting process.

Smoke Free is not only built with science, it adds to it too. As co-founder David Crane said: “This new feature demonstrates that we are continually improving a highly effective app – one with features that are based on evidence about what works and one that will increasingly help more people quit smoking.”

James Goolnik, twice voted the UK’s most influential dentist and founder of the City of London’s Bow Lane Dental Group, added: “This is a great tool to show how the health of the mouth is improving day by day as smokers become ex-smokers.”

Key benefits

  • Helps people stay smoke free for a month with missions proven to work
  • Logs cravings, offer tips on how to manage them and works out the patterns behind them
  • 20 established behaviour change techniques packed into a beautifully designed app
  • Loved by users, with the highest ratings of any stop smoking app in the iTunes Store