Controlling

Dengue Fever Mosquitoes using Intelligent Sensors and Traps

Gustavo Enrique de Almeida Prado Alves Batista
ICMC Universidade de So Paulo
Av. Trabalhador So-carlense, 400 13566-590
So Carlos, SP, Brazil
Phone: (+55) 16-3373-6612, e-mail: gbatista@icmc.usp.br

Google contacts: Daniel P. W. Ellis and Bilson Jake Libres Campana

Abstract


In the last decades we have witnessed a tremendous increase of dengue fever cases. Four decades ago only 9 countries had
reported severe dengue epidemics. Currently, dengue is endemic in more than 100 countries. In this project we discuss why
we are losing the war against dengue and propose a completely different approach for vector control. We propose to further
develop our recent research on intelligent sensors to field conditions. Our idea is to propose an inexpensive device that will
empower the population with the knowledge of Aedes aegypti densities. This will motivate local mosquito control activities
and put the population, governmental and aid organizations far ahead of disease outbreaks.

Proposal

Dengue is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease of humans in terms of morbidity and economic impact [1]. One
recent estimate indicates 390 million dengue infections per year, of which 96 million manifest clinically [2]. In addition to the
public health and economic costs, there is a major social impact in those countries where large epidemics occur, often
disrupting primary care for hospitalized patients [3]. Given the dramatic urban growth and lack of adequate surveillance for
dengue in tropical developing countries in the past 50 years, it is likely that even these figures underestimate the true disease
burden of dengue [4].

The number of dengue fever cases is alarmingly increasing. Before 1970, only 9 countries had experienced severe dengue
epidemics. The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries [4]. The America, South-East Asia and Western Pacific
regions are the most seriously affected. Cases across these areas exceeded 1.2 million in 2008 and over 3 million in 2013.
Recently the number of reported cases has continued to increase. In 2013, 2.35 million cases of dengue were reported in the
Americas alone, of which 37,687 cases were of severe dengue.

The truth is that we are losing the war against dengue besides the recent increase of funds to control mosquitoes. For
instance, in 2015, the Brazilian Health Ministry increased in 37% the funds spend by the federal government in comparison
with 2014. There was also an increase of 31.89% of funds spent by Brazilian national states and cities. Nevertheless, 745,957
cases of dengue fever, including 229 deaths, have been officially reported in Brazil only in the first 5 months of 2015 [5]. At
this point, it is crucial to understand the reasons why control actions against the Aedes aegypti are falling short.

Aedes aegypti is an urban mosquito. This means this mosquito is well adapted to city conditions, lives indoors and reproduces
easily in artificial water containers. This also means that the mosquito can spread rapidly and be present virtually anywhere
in an urban environment. This imposes serious restrictions to localized mosquito control activities. In short, mosquito control
interventions are costly. Therefore, applying them indiscriminately is impractical in terms of human and economic resources.

Currently, many mosquito control activities are planned based on hospitalization cases. The idea is to interview patients
diagnosed with dengue fever to infer the location of infection. Control interventions are priority performed in these likely
infection locations. However, such practice has severe limitations. The most prominent is the lag between contamination and
mosquito control activities, caused by incubation and diagnosis periods. The large number of asymptomatic dengue cases or
with mild symptoms (that accounts for a large fraction of the cases) and the inherent difficulty of predicting the
contamination location based on an interview also seriously hinder this strategy.

Hospitalization cases are technically a surrogate estimate of the true spatial density of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. In other
words, the spatial distribution of the mosquitoes is exactly what we need to know in order to plan the control interventions in
the field. However, as currently there is no technology to measure these distributions in a time and cost efficient way,
hospitalization cases are used as an (delayed and inaccurate) estimation of the mosquito distribution. Now, imagine if we
could know the Aedes aegypti mosquitos spatial density ahead of the dengue fever cases. That would change everything and
put the population, governmental and aid organizations far ahead of disease outbreaks.

In the last years, we have been working on a revolutionary

device for surveillance of disease vector mosquitoes and
agricultural pests. We developed a simple and inexpensive
sensor capable of using wing-beat data to classify insects in
flight. The idea is to have a light source, for instance a laser,
shining in a phototransistor. An insect flying across the
laser causes small variation in the light. These variations
are captured by the phototransistor and converted to a
digital signal. Figure 1 illustrates the sensor.

Figure 1: The logical design of the sensor that uses a light
We use machine learning algorithms to classify the flying
source and phototransistors to capture light variation due to
insect signals into its species and even sex. We note that for
wings movement
mosquito-borne diseases, only female mosquitoes make
blood meals in order to feed their eggs. We have shown
that, in laboratory conditions, we can classify insects of different species with accuracies in the range of 90%. In particular,
when we are interested in a single species (binary classification), such as a mosquito vector, we can reach accuracies around
98% [6] [7] [8].

In the last years we have moved from purely analog sensor [6] capable of capturing just wing-beat signals to a fully digital
sensor. This new sensor can also capture meteorological features such as humidity, temperature, wind speed and direction,
along with air pressure, luminosity and other features. An embedded microcontroller can process these features and provide
classifications in real-time. This new sensor can be augmented with a wireless link, opening a huge number of possibilities of
applications.

At this point, we are in position to develop and evaluate the sensor in field conditions. Field differs from laboratory condition
because of environmental changes can influence the behavior of the insects. For instance, it is well known that temperature
[9], humidity [10] and air pressure [11] can influence the wing-beat frequency of insects. In addition, insects frequently have
well defined behavior patterns influenced by luminosity and time-of-the-day, known as circadian rhythms [12].

This project proposes to collect insect data, investigate classification models and evaluate them in field conditions. In order to
do that, we need to face scientific and technological challenges. From the scientific standpoint, we need to develop models
that can account for environmental changes, presence of unknown classes and variable prevalence of classes. From
technological challenges, we need to provide classification mechanisms that can be implemented in an embedded
environment, in real-time and with significant restrictions of memory and processing power. We also need to design a
prototype that can work under severe climate conditions, such as high humidity.

Our plan is to collect labeled data in laboratory simulating environmental
changes. We built chambers that artificially control environmental conditions
such as temperature, humidity and air pressure (Figure 2). We also built a dark
chamber in which we can simulate sunlight conditions and control dawn and dusk
times. We will use these data to model the behavior of the insects in these
conditions. We will create classifiers that generalize to combinations of conditions
unseen in laboratory. We have already showed how it can be done for mosquito
circadian rhythms in an extended version of a recent paper [13].

Our objective at the end of this project is to have a standalone sensor that can
estimate Aedes aegypti densities in real-time. Such device will work in field
(external) conditions and will be low-powered enough to be run on rechargeable Figure 2: Example of chamber with
attached sensor used to collect data in
batteries and a solar panel.
laboratory

As a measure of success for this project, we believe that such a sensor should have at least 90% accuracy for identifying Aedes
aegypti mosquitoes in a large number of different environmental conditions.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Q: What are your mid-term envision for this project?
R: We believe that an intelligent trap based on this sensor can be mass-produced under 100 USD. Such trap will classify Aedes
aegypti mosquitoes in real-time and capture them using airflow. The captured mosquitoes will be held in a thin net where
they quickly die by dehydration. Such intelligent trap will be inexpensive enough to be sold as consumer electronics. The trap
will be augmented by a wireless link that will allow warning its user about the presence of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes using a
smartphone app. Multiple intelligent traps can provide a mosquito density map by crowdsourcing. Such a map can be a layer
in products such as Google Maps or Earth Engine and aid mosquito control agencies to plan interventions.

Q: Do you believe that a single device such as an intelligent trap can control the Aedes aegypti and eradicate dengue?
R: No. Dengue is a complex problem that must be tacked with actions not only in mosquito control, but also health care,
educational campaigns and other areas. However, we propose a paradigm shift to empower the population with the
knowledge of the presence of dengue mosquitoes in their residences/neighborhoods far before disease outbreaks. This will
naturally motivate individual control activities such as mosquito habitat reduction in these areas. It will also induce more
conscious citizens that will be able to claim for timely interventions from governmental agencies. Of course, the trap itself is a
vector control apparatus and will help to reduce the Aedes aegypti population.

Q: If I spot a mosquito inside a residence, isnt it likely to be an Aedes given its urban behavior?
R: No. There are more than 3,500 known species of mosquitoes and just a handful of species are harmful to humans and other
animals. Some of these species are more prevalent than Aedes aegypti in certain areas. For instance, Culex quinquefasciatus is
the most prevalent urban mosquito species in Brazil. Therefore, any strategy to estimate the population based on mosquito
spotting (even indoors) is doomed to fail due the large number of false positives.

Q: Are you proposing to develop a device that can recognize any species of mosquito/flying insect?
R: No. There are literally millions of species of insects and thousands of species of mosquitoes. Therefore, it would be very
difficult (if not impossible) for any machine learning system to recognize all of them. In practice, we are interested in
recognizing just one species, such as the Aedes aegypti, among a few dozen that might happen in a given location. This is a
much more manageable problem. We notice, however, that such device can be adapted to recognize different target species
by just updating its firmware with a different classifier. Therefore, the same device can be used to control, for instance,
malaria-vector mosquitoes or agricultural pests.

Q: Why not use microphones instead of optical sensors to capture wing-beat data?
R: The wing-beat data we optically capture is very similar to audio data. Actually, we frequently use audio processing features
in our classifiers [8]. Capturing audio data optically has several advantages. The most important one is that our sensor is
completely deaf to any agent that does not cross the light source. Therefore it is insensitive to noise sources such as cars,
birds, people, airplanes, and so on. Although microphones would be able to capture the same kind of data, such devices would
have to be extremely sensitive to capture mosquito signals. Therefore, they would also be very prone to capturing
background noise.

References

[1] D. Gubler (2012). The Economic Burden of Dengue. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 86(5):743
744.
[2] S. Bhatt, P. Gething, O. Brady, J. Messina, A. Farlow, C. Moyes et.al. (2013). The global distribution and burden of dengue.
Nature, 496:504-507.
[3] D. Gubler (2002). Epidemic dengue/dengue hemorrhagic fever as a public health, social and economic problem in the
21st century. Trends in Microbiology, 10:100103.
[4] WHO (2015). Dengue and severe dengue. World Health Organization Fact sheet N117. Updated May 2015.
[5] Ministrio da Sade (2015). Portal da Sade Situao Epidemiolgica / Dados e Boletins Epidemiolgicos.
http://portalsaude.saude.gov.br/index.php/situacao-epidemiologica-dados-dengue
[6] G. Batista, E. Keogh, A. Mafra Neto. (2011). Sensors and software to allow computational entomology, an emerging
application of data mining. In: 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD'11), p. 761-764.
[7] Y. Chen, A. Why, G. Batista, A. Mafra-Neto, E. Keogh (2014). Flying Insect Classification with Inexpensive Sensors. Journal
of Insect Behavior.
[8] D. Silva, V. Souza, D. Ellis, E. Keogh, G. Batista, G. (2015). Exploring Low Cost Laser Sensors to Identify Flying Insect
Species. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems.
[9] L. Taylor (1963). Analysis of the effect of temperature on insects in flight. Journal of Animal Ecology, 32(1):99117.
[10] K. Mellanby (1936). Humidity and insect metabolism. Nature, 138:124125.
[11] L. Chadwick, C. Williams (1949). The effects of atmospheric pressure and composition on the flight of drosophila. The
Biological Bulletin, 97(2):115137.
[12] B. Taylor, M. Jones (1969). The circadian rhythm of flight activity in the mosquito Aedes aegypti (l.): the phase-setting
effects of light-on and light-off. Journal of Experimental Biology, 51(10): 5970.
[13] Y. Chen, A. Why, G. Batista, A. Mafra-Neto, E. Keogh (2014). Flying Insect Classification with Inexpensive Sensors, ArXiv e-
prints, 1403.2654.

Data, Code and Results Policy

We will make public and freely accessible all data, code and detailed results regarding this project on the web page
http://www.icmc.usp.br/~gbatista/google_la_award. We will make our results easily reproducible by providing individual
pieces of source code to reproduce every figure and table of our papers. We will make available all data collected so other
researchers will be able to test their own classification methods in our data and directly compare with our results.