USF professors build smart mosquito trap to fight disease like dengue

TAMPA, Fla - Professors at the University of South Florida have built a "smart" mosquito trap that uses artificial intelligence to help combat mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever. 

USF dengue fever research 

The backstory:

Researchers at USF created a trap that can identify hundreds of mosquitoes at one time.

"There are about 45 different types of mosquito species in Florida alone, and close to 3,500 in nature, but only a handful spread diseases," Professor Sriram Chellappan, with USF's Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing said. "So, identifying which spread diseases is the holy grail of mosquito surveillance. But the problem is, nobody can do all the thousand. So almost 90%, 95% are simply discarded."

Without this device, professors explain that a county would trap mosquitoes, then manually identify them.

"We don't do trapping, but once the mosquitoes get trapped, they fall into this chamber, they get stuck on a sticky pad, which you will see soon and then, we have cameras that will take pictures, send the images to a cloud, or they could even be processed locally, and then, we will identify what genus and species the mosquitoes are," Chellappan said.

Associate Professor Ryan Carney, within USF's Department of Integrative Biology, says the device works in real time, and can identify the type of mosquito that spreads dengue fever with 98% accuracy.

"This is instantaneous results, compared to when a mosquito control district would set a trap, a traditional trap in the field, it would capture mosquitoes and maybe several days later would collect them, manually go through, an entomologist would then sort them and identify them," Carney said.

Professors at USF say they can alert a county or agency if a disease like dengue is being spread and identify potential hotspots.

Mosquito control district technology

What they're saying:

Carney says the smart trap is 3D-printed with all components of the device, at a cost of around $100.

Real-time mosquito identification

What's next:

Researchers recently got approval for another patent for the smart trap equipment. The team plans to begin deploying the traps across Florida and across the globe next year.