A new Internet-connected lighter called Quitbit will light your cigarette, but wean you off a smoking habit too.
A new Kickstarter campaign called Quitbit takes the same monitoring principles embedded into fitness trackers and helps users track and cutdown on smoking. In a nod to the name, it's like a Fitbit for smoking.
The product, which launched on Monday and is seeking $50,000 in funding pledges, is a pocket lighter that uses a heating coil similar to what's found in cars. But whether you're looking to quit or not, the lighter keeps track of every time you light up and logs that data in an accompanying app.
Users can set custom plans — so they can trim on intake at whatever pace they want — and see much money they've saved by cutting back on packs along the way. It also reveals the time since your last smoke, how many were consumed within a certain period of time and lets you call out the times you shared a cigarette with a friend (or let someone borrow the lighter).
The Quitbit, which also works with e-cigarettes or the patch, was developed by two friends who wanted an easy way to track the quitting process.
"Kuji and I were both smokers and met while in grad school together at Brown," co-founder Ata Ghofrani told. "I was trying to quit when he asked how much I smoked, and I realized there wasn't a really good way to keep track." "I was trying to quit when he asked how much I smoked, and I realized there wasn't a really good way to keep track."
Although there are countless apps on the market that help smokers quit, this is the first solution that includes hardware: "We wanted a piece of hardware to automatically monitor how much you're smoking, without having to manually enter that information within the app," he added.
Although it's up to each person to decide when and if they want to quit smoking, keeping the Quitbit in your pocket — we assume — gives the same affect of wearing a fitness wristband tracker. Sure, you might not wear a Fitbit to specifically lose weight, but it serves as a constant reminder to stay active.
The Quitbit will likely do the same; having access to all of your smoking data might the final nudge you need to scale back.
IMAGE: QUITBIT