Maroof Ahmed, Yusuf Sherwani, and Sarim Siddiqui were medical students when they came up with the idea to help smokers kick the habit using an app.
“We spent four months on a hospital respiratory unit together seeing patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer, a lot of it caused by smoking,” says Sherwani, CEO of Quit Genius. “We’d see doctors tell patients that they have to quit smoking, without giving them any tangible support to do that.”
Which is why the three put their clinical careers on hold to create Quit Genius.
Instead of asking you to rely on your own willpower to quit, the app uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to figure out why you started smoking and why you continue.
“CBT is the real gold standard for treating every single mental-health and addiction issue, but it’s historically been very difficult to scale and super-expensive,” Sherwani explains.
The app replicates the exchanges and interactions a therapist would have with a patient—putting it all into a fun-to-use form that you can engage with on the go.
You choose your own quit date and decide how much time to set aside for the app’s mindfulness exercises and self-reflection questions. The activities are broken up so that they should take about five minutes to complete. You’ll also keep a log of when you smoke and your mood at the time.
Instead of scaring you with statistics, Quit Genius focuses on the thinking patterns you’ve fallen into around smoking and shows you how to change that thinking to avoid common pitfalls.
Quit Genius will soon enter a full-scale clinical trial—the same one that traditional medications undergo. The founders hope that the app can one day be prescribed to treat other addictions.
“We’ve already had successful pilots with the NHS and health insurers,” says Sherwani. If the app works for smoking, Sherwani believes, the same approach can be applied to alcohol or opioid addiction.
“You can see apps being prescribed as digital medicine. That really is the future to keeping people healthy,” he says. “We know that there’s no pill that can change a person’s behavior. At the end of the day you have to do the hard work yourself, but smartphones can go a long way in aiding that.”