PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Mukundarajan, Haripriya
AU  - Hol, Felix J H
AU  - Castillo, Erica A
AU  - Newby, Cooper
AU  - Prakash, Manu
TI  - Using mobile phones as acoustic sensors for high-throughput mosquito surveillance
AID  - 10.1101/120519
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 120519
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/19/120519.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/19/120519.full
AB  - The direct monitoring of mosquito populations in field settings is a crucial input for shaping appropriate and timely control measures for mosquito-borne diseases. Here, we demonstrate that commercially available mobile phones are a powerful tool for acoustically mapping mosquito species distributions worldwide. We show that even low-cost mobile phones with very basic functionality are capable of sensitively acquiring acoustic data on species-specific mosquito wingbeat sounds, while simultaneously recording the time and location of the human-mosquito encounter. We survey a wide range of medically important mosquito species, to quantitatively demonstrate how acoustic recordings supported by spatio-temporal metadata enable rapid, non-invasive species identification. As proof-of-concept, we carry out field demonstrations where minimally-trained users map local mosquitoes using their personal phones. Thus, we establish a new paradigm for mosquito surveillance that takes advantage of the existing global mobile network infrastructure, to enable continuous and large-scale data acquisition in resource-constrained areas.