The Problem
Malaria, a preventable and curable parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes, kills roughly one million people each year – most of them children. Anti-malarial drugs, insecticides, and bed nets have curbed malaria’s spread through parts of the world, but existing countermeasures have only held the epidemic in check. Additional efforts are needed.
Our Approach
Reduce the number of parasite-carrying mosquitoes in key areas by creating a “fence” that identifies and kills the insect using lasers.
The Invention
Intellectual Ventures’ photonic fence couples low-cost camera and laser technology with software developed at the Intellectual Ventures Lab to locate insects, determine if that insect is a mosquito, identify if that mosquito is female (only females bite humans) and then shoot the insect out of the sky with a laser. The amount of energy required to kill a mosquito is very small and very low risk to humans, but even so, we’ve built in safeguards that ensure that the system doesn’t fire when anything much larger than a mosquito is in the path. Photonic fence devices could be set along the perimeters of villages or important buildings like health clinics to prevent infection.
Video
Mosquito Shootdown Sequence If played in real time, these segments would be roughly 1/10th of a second long.
Watch Nathan Myhrvold’s talk from TED 2010 about IV’s work to tackle malaria through technology, featuring a live demo of the photonic fence.
Images
