An increasing resilience problem, even in the northern hemisphere, is the climate change driven colonization of cities by disease carrying mosquitoes. These tiny insects kill almost 1 million people every year and account for 17% of the estimated global burden of infectious diseases. In 2018 an outbreak of West Nile Virus affected 12 European countries, infecting more than 1,500 people and provoking almost 200 deaths. Now in 2023, Peru is facing an unprecedented outbreak of Dengue, with more than 110,000 probable cases and at least 121 deaths, only until the end of May. State-of-the art in mosquito surveillance consists on manual inspections of traps. We have developed an IoT sensor that automatically detects and counts mosquitoes, and identifies species, sex and age with Artificial Intelligence (all the data required by Public Health Authorities). The data is wirelessly sent to a cloud server, enabling for the first time remote and automated surveillance of mosquitoes. The same information can be used to enhance reactive actions such as the control and suppression of the vector of transmission, as well as to monitor the effectiveness of the actions to improve the resilience of citizens in effected areas. The technology has been tested by public health professional under real operational conditions, in different countries and urban settings. Traps and sensors were deployed and samples were collected periodically. The inspection of the samples was performed manually and compared with the estimations done by the sensor. A correlation analysis was done to examine the association between the real and estimated counts. Correlations were significant for all cases (p-value < 0.001) and Pearson’s coefficients were close to 1 which indicated a positive strong linear relationship between the estimations made by the sensor and the real values found in inspections of the traps.
Share this page on your timeline