Medications like dextromethorphan, used to treat coughs caused by cold and flu, could potentially be repurposed to help people quit smoking cigarettes, according to a study by Penn State College of Medicine and University of Minnesota researchers. They developed a novel machine learning method, where computer programs analyze data sets for patterns and trends, to identify the drugs and said that some of them are already being tested in clinical trials. Cigarette smoking is risk factor for cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases and accounts for nearly half a million deaths in the United States each year. While smoking behaviors can be learned and unlearned, genetics also plays a role in a person's risk for engaging in those behaviors. The researchers found in a prior study that people with certain genes are more likely to become addicted to tobacco.

Smoking in public has been proven to be more harmful to nonsmokers, making it a huge public health concern with urgent need for proactive measures and attention by authorities. With the world moving towards the 4th Industrial Revolution, there is a need for reliable eco-friendly detective measures towards this harmful intoxicating behavior to public health in and out of smart cities. We developed an Interpretable feature learning framework for smoking behavior detection which utilizes a Deep Learning VGG-16 pretrained network to predict and classify the input Image class and a Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to explain the network detection or prediction of smoking behavior based on the most relevant learned features or pixels or neurons. The network's classification decision is based mainly on features located at the mouth especially the smoke seems to be of high importance to the network's decision. The outline of the smoke is highlighted as evidence for the corresponding class. Some elements are seen as having a negative effect on the smoke neuron and are consequently highlighted differently. It is interesting to see that the network distinguishes important from unimportant features based on the image regions. The technology can also detect other smokeable drugs like weed, shisha, marijuana etc. The framework allows for reliable identification of action-based smokers in unsafe zones like schools, shopping malls, bus stops, railway compartments or other violated places for smoking as per the government's regulatory health policies. With installation clearly defined in smoking zones, this technology can detect smokers out of range.

Health risks from cigarette smoking -- the leading cause of preventable death in the United States -- can be substantially reduced by quitting. Although most smokers are motivated to quit, the majority of quit attempts fail. A number of studies have explored the role of self-reported symptoms, physiologic measurements, and environmental context on smoking risk, but less work has focused on the temporal dynamics of smoking events, including daily patterns and related nicotine effects. In this work, we examine these dynamics and improve risk prediction by modeling smoking as a self-triggering process, in which previous smoking events modify current risk. Specifically, we fit smoking events self-reported by 42 smokers to a time-varying semi-parametric Hawkes process (TV-SPHP) developed for this purpose. Results show that the TV-SPHP achieves superior prediction performance compared to related and existing models, with the incorporation of time-varying predictors having greatest benefit over longer prediction windows. Moreover, the impact function illustrates previously unknown temporal dynamics of smoking, with possible connections to nicotine metabolism to be explored in future work through a randomized study design. By more effectively predicting smoking events and exploring a self-triggering component of smoking risk, this work supports development of novel or improved cessation interventions that aim to reduce death from smoking.