Can people become Qwitters?
I love this idea – tying together smoking cessation and social networking. It reminds me of the awe when I saw the marrying of videogames and maintaining good glucose control in glucoboy.
Qwitter, from tobacco free Florida, leverages the existing Twitter network to link people together and to monitor your own progress towards quitting smoking. Check out Qwitter. There is also a quick (qwick?) video on the site (although the connection does seem to be slow) that outlines how it works.
I had the luxury of spending a couple of years as a Visiting Worker for the National Research Council in Canada. I was working in their eHealth Group with Dr. Harrop. These were exciting times where some amazing ground work was done on Personal Health Records and how to use it integrate health behaviour change into people’s lives. Really, Qwitter is a very simple, targeted Personal Health Record that provides two of the key foundations of success for sustained change in behaviour that Dr. Harrop liked to quote:
- Engagement in a person’s own health information – by using Qwitter, you will log your smoking habits and can watch them change over time. That is a key base to change, is to understand baseline and to receive feedback.
- Community Support – by posting and inviting friends and family to participate through the Twitter Network, you are sharing your journey with them and they can support you in your process.
As I was writing this post, into my RSS feed came a great post on Zen Habits about health and balance where the guest poster talked about how he used his blog to publicly lose weight. He said it very well:
How am I healthier you ask? It’s simple really. I blogged. I read. People read. I felt accountable for my weight loss and health. We formed a community. I felt inspired. They felt inspired. I lost weight. I got healthier. I blogged some more. Repeat. It’s a no-brainer really.
The whole Qwitter site is public (you can, of course make up a great alias so nobody can figure out who you are, but everything you post is online. This is good to share publicly your thoughts and actions.
The Qwitter site also provides you with feedback in the form of graphs (see right).
Seems like a great idea, but I found it hard to find many people who had logged in and used it for more than a few days. I wonder if it would be more powerful if Qwitter is more integrated with community support locally. Perhaps providers and local programs could leverage a tool like this? I think this might be something to bring up with a couple of my patients.
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