Mosquitos may be small but can cause havoc in our lives with their small bites. There is no dearth of precautions and preventive measures taken by the health department or respective governments of countries. Still, it is impossible to curb the menace caused by malaria, dengue, zika, chikungunya and so on. Besides the bite, the humming buzz is equally obnoxious. It not only creates an irritating sensation to the years, but also gives you a fear that you might be bitten by any of the disease carrying mosquitos. Researchers are working day and night to find out new vaccines and new medicines, but here we will share with you a completely unconventional research that is going on parallely.
Researchers at the Stanford University are deploying this buzzing of mosquitos’ wings to determine what species of mosquitos it is. They have analysed the samples of the frequencies of the wingbeats of 20 different species. But the sample is too small compared to approximately 3,500 species in total. The main focus has been on the species that are known to cause disease.
The scientists researching on this project hope that the final outcome would enable people to record mosquitoes in the wild using their smartphones. This is unbelievable, but will be a reality in near future. The users can record the sound and submit the sounds online so they can be compared against that master set, all to help them better understand what mosquito species are these. The data base has been created by a low end Samsung flip phone. The better the phone the higher the precision but people in rural area with low end phones can use it.
Haripriya Mukundarajan, a doctoral student in the department of mechanical engineering at Stanford and the first author of the study published the staudy in a journal. She says their algorithm has about a 68 percent accuracy when identifying mosquito species. They are trying to ameliorate the precision.
“Sound is easy,” she says. “It’s the most noninvasive, easy way to identify a mosquito.”
