Control systems engineering for understanding and optimizing smoking cessation interventions

Cigarette smoking remains a major public health issue. Despite a variety of treatment options, existing intervention protocols intended to support attempts to quit smoking have low success rates. An emerging treatment framework, referred to as adaptive interventions in behavioral health, addresses the chronic, relapsing nature of behavioral health disorders by tailoring the composition and dosage of intervention components to an individual´s changing needs over time. An important component of a rapid and effective adaptive smoking intervention is an understanding of the behavior change relationships that govern smoking behavior and an understanding of intervention components´ dynamic effects on these behavioral relationships. As traditional behavior models are static in nature, they cannot act as an effective basis for adaptive intervention design. In this article, behavioral data collected daily in a smoking cessation clinical trial is used in development of a dynamical systems model that describes smoking behavior change during cessation as a self-regulatory process. Drawing from control engineering principles, empirical models of smoking behavior are constructed to reflect this behavioral mechanism and help elucidate the case for a control-oriented approach to smoking intervention design.