Qualitative and Sensitivity Analysis of the Effect of Electronic Cigarettes on Smoking Cessation

Recently, the role of the electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) in a way to reduce smoking is increasing. E-cigarettes are a device that delivers only the nicotine, and its use is considered less harmful to health compared with tobacco cigarettes. Smokers frequently make use of e-cigarettes as one of the nonsmoking aid devices. In this work, we propose a mathematical model to analyze the effect of e-cigarettes on smoking cessation. The stability and the bifurcation of the model have been discussed. The parameter estimations from the observed data are drawn, and using the parameters, a reasonable smoking model has been designed. Moreover, by considering the sensitivity results depending on the basic reproduction number R₀, the effective strategies that reduce the smokers are investigated. Numerical simulations of the model show that e-cigarettes may somewhat diminish the numbers of smokers, but it does not reduce the number of quitters ultimately.