As part of its Project Premonition research program, which seeks to detect emerging infectious diseases, Microsoft has been deploying a new prototype mosquito trap in Houston, Texas.
The trap is designed to collect only the specific type of mosquito a researcher wants to analyze and the company hopes it will help in the tracking of the mosquito-borne Zika virus.
The current Zika outbreak was first detected last year in Brazil and has been linked to more than 1,400 cases of microcephaly. It has since spread to at least 39 countries and territories in the Americas and is expected to arrive in the continental United States in the coming weeks as the weather warms.
Microsoft researcher Ethan Jackson, who heads up the project, said his team treats the mosquito as a means to collect blood from animals and humans. This allows scientists to analyze the blood for new or resurgent pathogens, whether or not they are spread by mosquitoes.
“The idea of Premonition is to use a mosquito as a device that can go out and sample blood and then from that mosquito, we can try to understand what pathogens it might have encountered,” said
“The technologies that we’re testing here in Houston are the Premonition trap, which is a sort of robotic smart trap that’s designed to understand what’s flying around it in the environment and collect only those things that you want to collect and that might be interesting to analyze.”
Microsoft says the traps use new advances in a branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning to differentiate between the mosquitoes researchers want to trap and other bugs they are not interested in. Researchers use the insects caught in the traps to build an algorithm to help the traps ‘learn’ to recognize the correct mosquito by the flap of its wing.
The trap also collects information on what time the mosquito was trapped and what the weather conditions were like at the time. The information can be analyzed and used to track where the mosquitos can be found that pose the greatest health risk, allowing authorities to target their eradication efforts in specific areas.
Project Premonition is a multi-year Microsoft project that aims to detect infectious disease outbreaks before they become widespread, allowing major health disasters to be prevented.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016
