Measuring for Change: Air Quality Feedback to Reduce Second-hand Smoke (SHS) Exposure in the Home

This is a European study which is part of a larger research project (The TackSHS project) funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No 681040) and led by the Catalan Institute of Oncology.

This study will examine the efficacy of using personalised air quality measurements in homes of smokers to encourage behaviour-change towards having a smoke-free home environment. Building on recent quantitative and qualitative work showing that feedback of second-hand smoke (SHS) measurement information can help motivate smokers to change their behaviour. This study will develop a targeted intervention for use with socio-economically deprived smokers in four countries (Scotland, Spain, Greece, Italy) across the EU. Two-hundred smokers (50 in each country) will be recruited and offered low-cost, simple to operate particle counting instruments to measure and log SHS levels in their home for a period of 30 days. During this time near real-time, personalised feedback will be provided to, and discussed with, the smoker along with target-setting and exploration of suitable methods of behaviour-change. Feedback will be given via text message to mobile phones, emails and personal voice calls. A final visit will gather data on changes made while a proportion of participants (10-20%) in each country will take part in a further qualitative interview by phone to gather data on their experience of the intervention.

Study outcomes will include quantitative measures such as changes in average and maximum fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations and self-declared household smoking rules, while qualitative data will be gathered using questionnaire and interview to explore what elements of the intervention were useful/unhelpful, particularly well/poorly understood, and what were the barriers for those who did not make changes. This WP will provide a comprehensive database of baseline measurements of SHS concentrations in home settings from across the EU with the potential to generate over 8 million minutes of measurements of household air quality. Analysis of the differences by country and possible determinants of exposure will be carried out.