Search

Counting mosquitoes in the wild is a crucial capability for monitoring, prediction, and control of vector-borne diseases. Current approaches are mainly manual, where specially designed mosquito traps or ovitraps are placed in areas of interest and recovered the next day. The counting itself is performed in an entomological laboratory, where individual mosquitoes are classified into species and counted. This process is costly, slow and inefficient. At the same time, mosquito counting is most relevant in tropical and sub-tropical countries, where mosquitoes spread deadly diseases like malaria, yellow fever and dengue fever. Many countries in these regions have relatively weak public health systems and so cannot support large-scale vector counting efforts. In this paper, we present a system architecture and a prototype to count mosquitoes in the wild with an Internet of Things approach. A sensor board is developed to gather audio data, and models are developed to detect, classify, and count mosquito species. Here, we present our prototype and an extensive background study of classifying mosquitoes based on sound recordings and some preliminary results and discussion.

While ubiquitous computing remains vastly applied in urban environments, their applications in ocean environment remain scarce due to the limitations in range and cost of current radio technology. This hinders environmental telemetry in the oceans and other remote areas. In this study, we explore the usage of IoT and Long Range Radio Communication (LoRa) in ocean environments. We study the maximum distance for LoRa and a potential location estimation based on the same technology using the passive RSSI analysis. Using three coastal based nodes and a node mounted on a sea vessel, we report a maximum range of 83.6km. We also achieve a location error within a radius of 3.4km (4% of maximum distance) in the sea. These results support marine biologist expeditions, allowing them to use low-cost, long-lasting and easy to deploy solutions for tracking marine objects and species in open ocean, providing them data in near-real-time. We discuss the findings from used models, outlining limitations, and providing a scenario for future ubiquitous IoT applications for tracking sea objects.

IoT has been widely adopted by HCI communities and citizen scientists to sense and control the surrounding environments. While their applications are mostly reported in urban settings, they remain scarce in aquatic settings. Oceans are undergoing an immense increase of human generated pollution ranging from noise to marine litter, where current USV solutions to detect its impact on environment remain at high cost. In our study, we design a first low-cost, long-range, radio controlled USV, based on IoT and LoRa, intended to be used for aquatic expeditions collecting environmental telemetry. We gather temperature, humidity, GPS position, footage and provide a mobile interface for remote controlling the USV. With this pilot study, we provide an initial study of the suitable simplistic GUI for long-range remote sensing in aquatic setting. We discuss the findings and propose future applications and Internet of Water Things as future research direction.

Mosquitoes are considered one of the more severe worldwide health hazards. Their populations vary heterogeneously in urban and rural landscapes, and fluctuate with seasonal or climatic trends and human activities. Thus, frequent widespread high-resolution surveillance of mosquitoes is essential for both understanding their complex ecology and behavior, and also predicting disease risk and formulating effective control strategies against mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and Zika. To this end, in this paper, we present LOCOMOBIS, a LOw-COst MOsquito BIoacoustic Sensor where the wingbeat sounds produced by mosquitoes in flapping-wing flight are used to identify different species automatically. The sensor has been deployed and tested in a real field deployment and our results demonstrate the practical feasibility of this low-cost nonintrusive approach for monitoring mosquitoes in places requiring vector monitoring aimed at mosquito control or eradication. Moreover, to make the system more ubiquitous and easy to interact with, we implemented a web-based application where it is possible to check the collected data and the automatic species and gender classification.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening new possibilities for sensing, monitoring and actuating in urban environments. They support a shift to a hybrid network of humans and things collaborating in production, transmission and processing of data through low-cost and low power devices connected via long-range (LoRa) wide area networks (WAN). This paper describes a 2-player duel game based on IoT controllers and LoRa radio communication protocol. Here we report on the main evaluation dimensions of this new design space for games, namely: (i) game usability (SUS) leading to an above average score; (ii) affective states of the players (SAM) depicting pleasant and engaging gameplay, while players retain control; (iii) radio coverage perception (RCP) showing that most participants did not change their perception of the radio distance after playing. Finally, we discuss the findings and propose future interactive applications to take advantage of this design space.