TY - JOUR TI - Using mobile phones as acoustic sensors for high-throughput mosquito surveillance AU - Mukundarajan, Haripriya AU - Hol, Felix Jan Hein AU - Castillo, Erica Araceli AU - Newby, Cooper AU - Prakash, Manu A2 - Chunara, Rumi VL - 6 PY - 2017 DA - 2017/10/31 SP - e27854 C1 - eLife 2017;6:e27854 DO - 10.7554/eLife.27854 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27854 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. KW - Mosquito KW - acoustic surveillance KW - citizen science JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -