'Shazam' App for Mosquitos - Researchers Seeking Citizen Scientists to Create Worldwide Map
Worldwide, over three billion people are at risk of contracting mosquito-borne infectious diseases, like malaria, dengue, and Zika. Stanford University researchers are looking to accurately and sensitively monitor the complex transmission dynamics involving mosquitoes and humans. Now, a simple recording of a mosquito's buzz on a cellphone could help contribute to a global-scale mosquito tracking map. The researchers are looking for 'citizen scientists' to contribute to Abuzz , a mosquito monitoring platform they developed to produce the most detailed global map of mosquito distribution.
Transcript
00:00:00 What you're listening to right now is a musical tune that's primarily been produced by wing beats of different species of mosquitoes, and in this work what we figured out is you could use these signatures to practically identify these mosquitoes in field conditions. You think of Abuzz as Shazam for mosquitoes. For many mosquito-borne diseases, there's no drugs. There's also no vaccine. So basically the main thing you can do
00:00:41 is try to bring down the mosquito population and therefore prevent people from getting sick. But to do that, you need to know what type of mosquito is where. Every different kind of mosquito actually makes simply different sound and what we came up with is a way in which you can use your phone to record that sound, and by using that sound and processing it your phone can actually tell you what type. What species that mosquito was. Pull out your mobile phone when you see a mosquito around you
00:01:06 and identify the microphone, point it at the mosquito and make a sound recording. Even about a second's worth of sound from the mosquito is good enough. Go to abuzz.stanford.edu and upload that file on our website and we'll be able to process that and return information. We can tell what kind of mosquito it is and since it's made on a phone that automatically registers both the time and the place of recording as well. All these scientific insights that you need from the field
00:01:37 are very hard to collect by just a few set of researchers. And by building tools which could provide large-scale surveillance for these mosquitoes that specially carry human diseases like dengue, chikungunya, malaria. We could enable the world's largest network of mosquito surveillance just purely using tools that almost everyone around the world now is carrying in their pocket. We made sure that you can do this
00:02:04 with a very broad range of phones even with decades-old $10 flip phones. We made sure that we can get the biggest userbase possible. What I would love to see is people really thinking hard about the biology of these complex animals. Engage in the problem. Make your own community safer. If you see a mosquito and you swat it you saved yourself an itch for one day. But if you see a mosquito and you record it and you send
00:02:31 the data to the Abuzz Project, then you've potentially contributed to an effort that can reduce the burden of mosquito-borne disease for many generations in the future. For more, please visit us at Stanford.edu.