The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has created a free app designed to help smokers quit their addiction.
The Tobacco Quit and Save app calculates how much money the user can save by avoiding cigarettes and sends a reminder about quitting whenever the user goes into a convenience store, according to USA Today.
Tobacco use is one of the leading causes of preventable death and disease in Colorado, with one in six Coloradans smoking cigarettes and over half of smokers saying they want to quit, the Chaffee County Times reported. A smoker who smokes a pack each day spends about $2,000 per year on cigarettes.
"Tobacco use costs Colorado too many lives and too much money," said Dr. Larry Wolk, department executive director and chief medical officer. "We developed this new app to help Coloradans easily learn about the cost of smoking and find resources to help them quit."
The Tobacco Quit and Save app lets users track their real-time savings by setting a quit date and giving information the quit date, how many cigarettes are smoked each day, the cost of a pack of cigarettes, and the number of cigarettes in each pack. The app shows the benefits in quitting, such as the money saved, days added to life, cigarettes that were not smoked and the number of days since the last smoke. If the user has a relapse, the app saves the user's best quitting attempt, the Chaffee County Times reported.
The app also has a GPS that tells the user when he/she is close to a store that sells cigarettes to remind them of their goal to quit.
Dave Brendsel, a spokesman for the state's prevention service division, talked about the benefits of using an app in helping people quit smoking, USA Today reported.
"Everyone has phones, and most people are accessing their day-to-day information on their phone," Brendsel said. "For smokers, this seemed like a great way to keep motivated to quit smoking."
People who use the app can access information on quitting resources and services in Colorado at TobaccoFreeCO.org, the Chaffee County Times reported. Support is also available through social media, in which users can let friends and family know how much they've saved and how much they haven't smoked through posts from the app to Twitter and Facebook.
