UC Riverside to design ultra-cheap sensors to fight malaria with $100,000 Gates Foundation grant

University of California - RiversideNov 11 2010

Professor will use grant from Gates Foundation to design ultra-cheap sensors that could help fight malaria

The University of California, Riverside announced today that it has received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will support an innovative global health research project conducted by Eamonn Keogh, a professor of computer science and engineering in the Bourns College of Engineering, titled "Counting and classifying insects with ultra-cheap sensors."

Keogh's project is one of 65 grants announced by the Gates Foundation in the fifth funding round of Grand Challenge Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries. The grants were provided to scientists in 16 countries on five continents.

"These are bold ideas from innovative thinkers, which is exactly what we need in global health research right now," said Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health Program. "I'm excited to see some of these daring projects develop into life-saving breakthroughs for those who need them the most."

To receive funding, Keogh showed in a two-page application how his idea falls outside current scientific paradigms and might lead to significant advances in global health. The initiative is highly competitive, receiving more than 2,400 proposals in this round.

Through the grant, Keogh aims to further understand the movement of mosquitos to help scientists combat malaria, a disease that kills nearly one million people worldwide each year. Since the disease is carried by mosquitoes, many scientists are attempting to create models that show how malaria spreads in a region, and how it responds to suppression programs. To build such models, the movements of mosquitoes in a space and over time must be understood, Keogh said.

Insect counts are currently achieved by placing traps in an area, and counting the number of target species caught in a time frame. This is expensive in terms of materials and human time, and creates a lag between the time the trap is placed and inspected. Thus, there is a need for accurate automatic sensors to detect, differentiate and count insects and immediately transmit the data wirelessly.

Working with his post-doctoral student, Gustavo Batista, an assistant professor at the University of S-o Paulo in Brazil and Agenor Mafra-Neto, CEO/president of ISCA Technologies, a commercial entomology company in Riverside, Keogh has shown that simple sensors, made from modified laser pointers purchased at a 99 cent store, can measure insects wing beat frequency from a distance, and this information can be used to distinguish at least some insects species. The grant will fund further work that will allow more species of insects to be classified from a greater distance.