Participatory Development of a Gender-Specific Smoking Cessation Smartphone App for Women

Context: Women experience lower success rates in quitting smoking compared to men, partly due to gender-related barriers to quitting. The majority of smoking cessation apps are designed in a genderneutral manner, inadvertently contributing to gender disparities in quitting outcomes.

Objective: To codevelop a smartphone smoking cessation app that addresses women-specific motives for smoking and barriers to quitting.

Study Design and Analysis: From July 2022 to June 2023, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five women who smoked to understand how their motives for smoking and barriers to quitting relate to gender. We used gender theory to analyze the interviews and interpret them while considering gender identity, gender roles, and gender relations. We used the data from the interviews with existing literature on gender and smoking to create gender-informed smoking cessation content. The new content was added to a pre-existing gender-neutral smoking cessation app “My Change Plan” (MCP) to create the MCP-Woman (MCP-W).

Setting: Outpatient smoking cessation clinic.

Population Studied: Adult women smokers.

Results: The MCP-W smartphone app offers content that addresses gender-related motives for smoking and barriers to quitting. It includes testimonials from women which present their struggles with quitting and how they managed to overcome them. It provides the users with insights regarding the initial steps to take in their quit journey, how do cope with stress in healthy ways, and the importance of receiving support from other women during the quit process. We embedded four animation videos, each ranging from 3 to 4 minutes in length in the app. The topics of these videos were: 1) What may influence women’s smoking behaviour? 2) Does smoking help cope with stress? 3) Women talk about their quit journey, and 4) Initiating change in my smoking (https://youtu.be/IFZrJ14kzxk). Also, the app offers gender-neutral content which supports a personalized quit plan, goal setting, awareness of smoking triggers, developing coping strategies, recognizing support systems, and tracking cigarettes/cravings.

Conclusions: The MCP-W app, co-developed by women smokers, is based on gender theory, thereby acknowledging prevalent gender-related barriers to quitting and providing support for women in recognizing opportunities for change. Currently, the app is undergoing testing to evaluate its acceptability and feasibility among women smokers.