DeepPuff: Utilizing Deep Learning for Smoking Behavior Identification in Free-living Environment

A comprehensive assessment of cigarette smoking behavior and its effect on health requires a detailed examination of smoke exposure. We propose a CNN-LSTM-based deep learning architecture named DeepPuff to quantify Respiratory Smoke Exposure Metrics (RSEM). Smoke inhalations were detected from the breathing and hand gesture sensors of the Personal Automatic Cigarette Tracker v2 (PACT 2.0). The DeepPuff model for smoke inhalation detection was developed using data collected from 190 cigarette smoking events from 38 medium to heavy smokers and optimized for precision (avoidance of false positives). An independent dataset of 459 smoking events from 45 participants (90 smoking events in the lab and 369 smoking events in free-living conditions) was used for testing the model. The proposed model achieved a precision of 82.39% on the training and 93.80% on the testing dataset (95.88% in the lab and 93.78% in free-living). RSEM metrics were then computed from the breathing signal of each detected smoke inhalation. Results from the RSEM algorithm were compared with respiratory metrics obtained from video annotation. Smoke exposure metrics of puff duration, inhale-exhale duration, and inhalation duration were not statistically different from the ground truth generated through video annotation. The results suggest that DeepPuff may be used as a reliable means to measure respiratory smoke exposure metrics collected under free-living conditions.