Project Description
The Cig’s Case is a smart cigarette case with an innovative method
of smoking cessation to help people gradually quit smoking.
Many people experience resolving to give up cigarettes
for their health or for their families. However, it is very
difficult to quit smoking by themselves because of nicotine
dependence and withdrawal symptoms as well as weak self-motivation.
We've taken a whole new approach to smoking cessation in our
products. By inputting the user's quit cycle, daily number of
cigarettes and daily smoking duration, The Cig's Case will
automatically calculate a set of personalized quitting plans
suitable for users to gradually quit smoking.
When users interact with the small robot Marvin in the
product, their relatives and friends will also participate in the
interaction of the product as the supervisory/hortative personnel of
the users to quit smoking. Through acoustic and physical interaction
patterns, the product can help users divert their attention from
smoking and realize the harm and unnecessariness of smoking through
their sense of belonging and guilt to their family and friends.
Technical Description
Our product has been enhanced from the prototype stage in three main
areas: the structure of the cigarette case, the interactive features
and the hardware enhancements.
Firstly, for the
structure of the cigarette case, we used a harder and better looking
acrylic sheet than the previous plastic covered cardboard. We
designed an AutoCAD drawing of the double-layer acrylic case for
laser cutting, using frosted pink acrylic for the outer layer and
clear acrylic for the inner slot. Additional inlays were made for
the front screen, side buttons and back touch sensor to ensure
aesthetic appeal, and a precisely designed mortise and tenon
construction for each plane to ensure stability once assembled.
For the interaction function, a copper plate and a
flexible plastic sheet with a copper foil bonded to it are used as
sensors to detect the picking or placing behaviour of the cigarette
in the cigarette slot. Normally, when a cigarette is placed in the
slot, it acts as an insulator preventing the plastic sheet from
coming into contact with the copper plate. Once the cigarette has
been pulled up, the plastic sheet will make contact with the copper
plate to energise it to record the action, and vice versa.
For the hardware upgrade, in order to ensure that the
box is not too large and at the same time improve its functionality
and interactivity, we spent the group's budget on new hardware,
including a new adafruit motherboard and an 8x8 pixel board which
displays images clearly. The functional and visual presentation
maintains the full functionality of the prototype stage in a
significantly reduced size.
Final Statement
At the exhibition, the weather was a bit cold but sunny, the shadow
of the tent ensured the normal display of our product's pixel and
laptop video looping. After the sunset, our booth also attracted
many visitors due to the interesting patterns displayed by the
pixel. As we were assigned a location close to the main entrance of
the Andrew Building, our product almost became the end of the
exhibition route, but the enthusiasm of the visitors far exceeded
our expectations.
We once used real cigarettes with better softness and elasticity for
display. However, considering the possibility of minors
participating in the exhibition, we replaced them with fake
cigarettes assembled with oak and painted with dyes on the day
before the exhibition.
During the exhibition, we found that the fake cigarettes exerted
excessive pressure on the elastic plastic sheets inside the case,
causing them to lose their elasticity. The consequence is that the
case is difficult to detect the movement of pulling out the
cigarette. Luckily, there was still a piece of plastic that held up
its strength, so we used it most of the time for our interaction
demonstrations, and it worked successfully and accurately till the
end of the exhibition.
During the demonstration of individual interactions, the audio
speaker had a technical issue. The team quickly checked and fixed
this unexpected problem that was caused by a wrong operation when
initializing the case. Then we continued to use canonical
initialization in the follow-up event.
Most visitors have positive comments on our products and supporting
materials.
About 20% of all visitors fit our target audience (smokers who want
to quit). One audience showed high interest in the functionality of
the case, and admitted that the Calling punishment would actually
interfere with his desire to smoke. At the same time, most of the
visitors also filmed interactive videos to share with their smoker
friends. This is evidence of our success in communicating the
concept of interaction design.
For non-smoking visitors, they appreciated the structural design of
the case, whether it is the precise internal slot assembly or the
aesthetic case appearance. In addition, they said that giving
cigarette packs a personality to interact with was a novel
experience. They will usually ask to interact again after the
interaction flow for the pixel patterns. When we expressed the
design concept of interactive punishment, they thought it would be
really embarrassing to do these operations in public space, which is
what we expected.
Our next step will sense the user's contact information through a
principle similar to the Apple Watch to truly achieve level 2
punishment. Since some visitors felt that the size of the case was
too large, the space design of the case could be further iterated.
Similarly, conveying text through scrolling is a bit tiring for
users to read. We believe that replacing pixels with the LCD screen
can solve this problem and optimize the user experience as well.