Solar Scare Mosquito 2.0

Here are some recent articles published on top tech blogs, since the announcement of the Hackaday Prize 2020 finalists: 

1. Hackaday: Improved mosquito birth control causes ripple effect
2. Arduino: Solar Scare Mosquito 2.0 detects and destroys potential disease-carrying insects
3. Hackster.io: This Solar-Powered Device Kills Mosquito Larvae to Prevent the Spread of Disease

These are being widely shared on various platforms which clearly reflects the widespread appeal for our simple yet impactful solution!

The Solar Scare Mosquito 1.0 had litterally gone viral on the Internet with dozens of news articles published on it and was even featured on television in Brazil: 

Since its initial conception, we have come a long way from the original idea behind the Solar Scare Mosquito. 

Not only has the design evolved, but also the underlying theory, which is expected of any design process following the scientific method! 

Some important researches on the topic and IoT-related technologies which we not available in 2014, have been incorporated in the new version. 

While we are firm believers of the philosopy "Form follows function", we try to embed aesthetics into every detail of our solution. 

The device lid with the solar panel is magnetically attached to the body, and can be removed and positioned away according to the availability of sunlight around the water body. 

Under this lid, is a second lid which is etched with an artistic design of a lotus. At night, this lid is backlit with blue light, to evoke the image of a floating blue lotus on water. 

Besides the visual effect, we chose to embed the blue lotus design since it has an esoteric symbolism in almost all ancient cultures, be it Egyptian, Buddhist or Hindu. 

For the curious ones: https://www.petalrepublic.com/lotus-flower-meanings/

The most common way to identify mosquito-species present in a neighbourhoud are sentinel traps which attract mosquitoes using a combination of CO2, odour and light. While this is the most accurate method, it is expensive, labour intensive and slow as it needs to be carried out in a lab. 

There are also optical sensor-based solutions which are more accurate than microphone-based systems but they are expensive and not scalable. 

Finally, researchers in Stanford University, Oxford University and University of Glasgow are trying to use smartphones to capture the mosquito wing-beat frequency to map their population. Like these cutting-edge independent researchers, we are also exploring ways to overcome the following issues with microphone-based identification and counting of mosquitoes: 

• Minimising false-positives on account of background noise 
• Distinguishing the buzz from multiple mosquitoes at the same time 
• Taking into account (negligible) changes in the wingbeat frequency on account of ambient temperature, humidity, and maturity of a mosquito.

Our main source of inspiration for the bioacoustic approach is this research at Prakash Lab, Stanford : "Using mobile phones as acoustic sensors for high-throughput mosquito surveillance" https://elifesciences.org/articles/27854

Just a couple of days ago, Bill Gates revealed an ambitious technology called Microsoft Premonition: https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/microsoft-premonition/ 

"Today, more than ever, new global sensor networks are needed to protect our health, and the health of our economies and societies.

Microsoft Premonition is an advanced early warning system that combines robotic sensing platforms, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and cloud-scale metagenomics to autonomously monitor disease-carrying animals such as mosquitoes, robotically collect environmental samples, and then genomically scan them for biological threats.

Like weather prediction, its analytics pipelines uses cloud-scale computing, leveraging the latest advancements in Azure IoT and Azure Data Lake on Microsoft Azure. Today, Premonition’s pipelines have scanned more than 80 trillion base-pairs of genomic material from environmental samples for biological threats."

This is a highly advanced technology and encompasses all epidemics including the likes of COVID-19. 

We believe our low-cost environmental data capture solution can be complementary to such a platform being developed. Moreover, besides just monitoring the evolution of epidemics, our solution also prevents mosquito-breeding too.

That's two birds in one stone!

Mosquito-borne epidemics are one of humanity's greatest challenges, which cannot be single-handedly tackled due to their complexity and magnitude. Hence, in the spirit of open innovation, we would be delighted to collaborate on this project with the following experts:

1. Conservation X Labs: Access to their "Sentinel System", which is an online toolkit to use machine learning for processing environmental data.

2. Hackaday Prize Finalists: Learn from Aquametric - Cellular based stream monitors about their great live data dashboard and learn about Intelligent Wildlife Species Detector 's audio processing tech. 

A few years ago, I had designed a low-cost, solar-powered device to eliminate mosquito-larvae in stagnant water bodies such as water tanks, swamps and micro dams.

The project was first picked up by Hackaday from Instructables, then by Wired Magazine, and finally shared by Bill Gates on Twitter! 

During the lockdown period in France, while witnessing a pandemic take over the world by surprise, I decided to take up once again this project, but this time to build upon it an IoT platform for an early-warning system for all mosquito-borne epidemics. 

Wired Magazine Article: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mosquito-device

Can't thank Hackaday enough for popularizing the Solar Scare Mosquito 1.0!

A linear actuating model for prototype V2 was being brainstormed to remove drift, but was set-aside for later iterations due to water-proofing issues.

Schematic circuit diagram for solar scare mosquito prototype V2

Credits to Satya and Kousheek from Technovation, at Instructables, for helping us with the 3D model and circuit https://www.instructables.com/member/Technovation/. 

The Solar Scare Mosquito 1.0 was a frugal hack built with few means and resources. 

It served the purpose well of being a solar-powered floating device with creates ripples in stagnant water to prevent larvae from breathing at the surface. 

However, the system was neither robust nor ergonomic. The following circuit was used to run the device: 

You can see how far we have come from this first frugal prototype to the neat, function-rich, 3D printed Solar Scare Mosquito 2.0.