VectorCam Innovation for Mosquito Surveillance Lauded by Bill Gates

A mosquito identification tool pioneered by Dr. Soumyadipta Acharya, Professor of Bioengineering in Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID) and a member of CGDHI’s faculty, has caught the attention of Bill Gates. VectorCam is currently featured on “Gates Notes,” Bill Gates’s personal blog where he writes about ideas, innovations, issues, and even books on his reading list, that he finds compelling.  

VectorCam is an AI-based software application on a mobile device that instantly identifies mosquitoes by species, sex, and if female, its feeding and reproductive cycle status. Knowing such data helps health workers plan community responses to mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, and zika. With a 90% accuracy rate in resource-constrained settings, VectorCam’s user-friendly design allows community health workers (CHWs) to conduct routine mosquito surveillance in real-time using their smartphones, a task usually requiring access to a lab as well as years of training as an entomologist. Currently, very few community health workers are equipped with these skills. With VectorCam, tens of thousands of CHWs can easily send data from their phones for aggregation and analysis at local and regional health system offices, removing the need for inefficient paper-based systems. This efficient transmission of data also enables health district officials and vector control officers to strategize more quickly and more effectively on vector control responses. 

Dr. Acharya developed VectorCam in conjunction with a multidisciplinary team of Johns Hopkins University bioengineers and public health professionals, including co-founders Sunny Patel, biomedical engineer, and Marina Rincon Torroella, an MPH graduate from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Once the innovation was deemed field-ready, the team undertook pilot testing and stakeholder engagement facilitated through partnerships with Makerere University and the Ugandan Ministry of Health. These same partners then helped scale up this technology in the Adjumani and Mayuge districts of Uganda.  

Dr. Smisha Agarwal, CGDHI Director, advised the team on their scale-up plan, sharing best practices for introducing a new digital tool into a health system. Empowering local health workers with context-appropriate training and project leadership, including participation in the pilot design, helped the VectorCam team experience a successful initial rollout.   

The VectorCam team has just finished a randomized controlled trial of the tool and its usability in Uganda, with support from its Ugandan partners and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As preliminary findings have proven favorable, they hope to scale up further within Uganda as well as expand to other countries where malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases are endemic. Team members are also exploring how to localize VectorCam’s software and hardware production and support within East Africa, a key step for ensuring sustainability of digital health innovations.