Are financial incentives the key to quitting smoking? This device could hold the answer

A medical device called the ‘Smokerlyzer’ is being used to study the effectiveness of financial incentives and smoking cessation.

Manufactured by Bedfont Scientific, the Smokerlyzer is a breath analysis medical device used to help people quit smoking. It will be used in a clinical study at the Maastricht University to investigate whether or not a reward makes smoking cessation more effective.

The project, CATCH (Continuous Abstinence Through Corporate Healthcare) will take several Dutch companies partaking in Smoking Cessation programmes, however only half of the subjects will receive gift certificates for their efforts.

The Smokerlyzer range is a series of carbon monoxide (CO) monitors that measures the harmful amount of CO that is inhaled from smoking, which can show how much a patient has been smoking, giving smoking cessation advisors an idea on the level of dependency that the smoker has.

SineFuma, a Smokerlyzer distributor for Bedfont, is the biggest smoking cessation company in the Netherlands. Marcel Clarijs, director at SineFuma, explained: "It is beautiful that we can work together with the university and participate in research to find how we can get more succesfull quitters. We ran the smoking cessation programme within this study and were able to provide them with useful Smokerlyzer monitors so they can validate the success rates. This CATCH project consisted of about 60 group trainings with 50 different companies to help employees to quit smoking. Roughly 600 people participated in total and now over the next 3 years the university will do the research.”

Jason Smith, managing director at Bedfont, added, “The Smokerlyzer has been used globally for over 30 years now to help people quit smoking – it is quick, easy and non-invasive making it a valuable tool to monitor a quit attempt, as well as being a motivational visual aid to encourage the user to quit smoking. We are very proud that SineFuma has managed to involve the piCO Smokerlyzer in this study and hopefully, through the research done by Maastricht University, we can help to find new methods and incentives to help people quit smoking successfully.”