Microsoft working on a digital mosquito trap waiting to deploy drones begin next year and which seeks to prevent the advance of diseases like dengue or malaria and even anticipate further outbreaks.
“The mosquito is the most dangerous place on earth for the large number of pathogens that transports animal and its ability to cause disease,” he told Efe Ethan Jackson, researcher who leads the project, baptized with the name “ Premonition ” (Premonition).
“ Our goal is to be able to catch mosquitoes large scale and low cost “Jackson said during a demonstration at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond (US West Coast).
The clever trap, weighing just under one kilo, includes 50 small compartments equipped with sensors that identify, by the noise, what kind of insect has entered the trap and close only after determining that a mosquito has come.
The traps used in the today are similar to those used four or five decades ago and the system to deploy in remote areas of Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa, to cite just a few examples, it is still very manual.
Microsoft recalls in an article about the project posted on his blog that the current traps use battery needs to be replaced several times a year and some experiments require chemicals to be transported by boat because the air regulations do not allow traveling in aircraft.
Jackson also told Efe reminded that current traps collect all kinds of insects, making entomologists have to spend hours selecting specimens they really need.
“Our trap will save many hours of work,” said the researcher.
Jackson and his team work with scholars in various disciplines in the development of the system, which aims is analyze the collected mosquitoes once to detect early signs of dangerous diseases.
Douglas Norris, professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins Baltimore (Maryland, USA), believes that once the system is fully developed ability to predict epidemics will be “huge”.
James Pipas, a professor of molecular biology University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA), who also works in “Premonition” says in a video on initiative by Microsoft, that the project aims to “monitor the movement of infectious agents throughout the world. “
” What we would like, ultimately, it is to have a comprehensive system in place to detect infectious agents and follow their movement once they start to emerge, so that we can intervene before they become an epidemic or an infectious problem for humans or wildlife, “Pipas said.
Currently, health authorities only react once there was an outbreak and people begin to get sick, which means that the vaccine supply is not always enough and may even take months to develop.
” Premonition “allow public officials to prepare before the outbreak from becoming a problem.
Microsoft and conducted a pilot project this year with drones in Granada in the Caribbean and anticipates it will be ready to deploy smart trap in the first quarter of 2016, while acknowledging that the full development of the system may take a few years.
This system would include advanced operating systems to analyze mosquitoes, viruses and differentiate between known and those that are not yet known.
This will require increased computing power available today and develop new algorithms to process data much more fast.
Microsoft also wants to use artificial intelligence to strengthen the autonomy of the drones, so that they can make decisions about the best places to deploy traps same way would a biologist.
“I am convinced that in the next five years we have ready a system of this kind,” Jackson said.
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