Ripple: Mosquito Control and Monitoring

Almost 3.2 Billion people are at risk of Malaria and this risk is increasing with climate change. 

The WHO estimates that we need to invest USD 100 billion to eradicate this disease by 2030. Moreover, the treatment costs are expected to rise by $500 million dollars annually on account of insecticide resistance.  

This is why we have developed Ripple, the first bio-inspired mosquito-birth control solution, which costs less than 10 dollars. Most of us know that mosquito larvae breed in stagnant water, but need to breathe air.

So Ripple, a floating solar-powered device, shakes the surface water to drown these larvae. It is cheap enough for the beneficiaries to afford it and needs no maintenance.

Our goal is to protect 100 million people from mosquito-borne epidemics by 2025 and help to save 3.5 billion dollars in lost economic value.

In 2020, more people died in Africa from malaria than of COVID-19; killing one child every two minutes. Globally, almost 3.2 Billion people are at risk of Malaria and this risk is increasing with climate change.

The World Health Organization estimates that we need to invest USD100 billion to eradicate this disease by 2030. The treatment costs are expected to rise by $500 million annually on account of insecticide resistance.

Hence, we are developing a bio-inspired and chemical-free alternative to prevent mosquito-breeding in stagnant water bodies. 

We propose a systemic solution by targeting a root cause of the spread of malaria: stagnant water

COVID-19 pandemic was an eye opener to the importance of having an early-warning systems for epidemics. For 10 months, we have been working on a smart IoT device to monitor and prevent mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria.

Our solution is two-pronged: 

1. Mosquito Control: Eliminate mosquito-larvae in stagnant water tanks, ponds and ditches, by using air bubbles to create ripples and preventing larvae from breathing at the surface. The device is completely maintenance-free: solar-powered and automatically turns on when in contact with water.

2. Monitor impact of intervention: Capture real-time entomological data on the presence of dangerous mosquito species in a neighborhood by using multiple inbuilt microphones to capture the mosquito’s wingbeat frequency to determine its species and sex. For this, we are collaborating with Stanford University's "Shazam for Mosquitoes" initiative.

The bio-acoustic data is pre-processed on the device using EDGE AI and the relevant classified wing-beat frequency data is uploaded for further analysis and visualization on AWS IoT Cloud. More details on section on core technology.  

Our invention gained international attention in 2014, when Bill Gates endorsed it on social media.

The primary users of our solution are individuals and organisations in malaria endemic regions. However, most of them are in the “bottom of the pyramid”, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, and cannot pay for the device, Hence we have two ways to reach them: 

1. B2B: Companies such as Unilever, located in high-risk regions, who are willing to protect their employees and neighbourhood as part of CSR 

2. B2G: Public health agencies like UNICEF and NGOs such as “Médecins Sans Frontières'

To understand the needs of our end clients, we are reaching out to the following groups through our personal and professional networks: 

• Individuals living in areas with high risk of mosquito-borne disease

• corporate professionals having operations in endemic regions 

• vector control program managers

In the coming 3 months, we will be shipping our prototypes to these stakeholders, for testing and feedback in their diverse field conditions. 

Globally, almost 3.2 Billion people are at risk of Malaria and this risk is increasing with climate change.

We propose a systemic solution by targeting a root cause of the spread of malaria: stagnant water. This is better than reactively developing new pesticides and vaccines. It also helps protect wetland ecosystems from toxic larvicides and adulticides used today.

Thus our goal is to prevent 10 million cases of malaria and 10k deaths by 2025.

Bridging the data gap on mosquito population: monitor the impact of our solution by installing nodal connected devices that map mosquito populations in real time. 

The device was originally invented by Pranav in 2014, and since then we have conducted multiple successful field tests. In partnership with the ARCTEC at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, we are lab-testing the solution. 

In parallel, about 20 devices will be installed in the Pantanal in Brazil in a cattle ranch, to monitor and validate the impact by September 2021. 

We are also in contact with Stanford University and others to work on a collaborative research model.

Interest is raising as we are communicating more about the device and we already have potential partnerships coming from USA, Portugal, Madagascar and La Réunion Island (France)

We all know that mosquitoes breeding in stagnant water, right? But why didn't anyone think of "un-stagnanting" the water? Well, that's what we did. 

The Ripple is the first bio-inspired smart mosquito birth control solution. Besides several international awards and endorsement by Bill Gates, the invention has made it to FAST COMPANY's list of "30 Best World Changing Ideas of 2021" in the category Developing World Technology and received an Honorable Mention. This selection was made out of 4000+ applications and will be officially announced in the May issue of the magazine.   

There are two main innovative aspects to our systemic solution against epidemics:

The "Ripple Mosquito Control" is the first bio-inspired solution to prevent mosquito-breeding in stagnant water, without harmful pesticides which affect the aquatic food webs and ecosystems.   

The focus to keep the overall technology affordable and scalable in low-income countries, has led us to choose acoustic identification of mosquito species, over optical/image recognition. Most competing solutions use the latter method which is manifold more expensive, but rapidly evolving technologies are making bioacoustics the preferred approach for identifying various types of fauna especially insects.

Even if acoustic identification is believed to be less accurate than optical identification, by deploying a large number of our devices at 10x less cost, we can compensate for the initial lack of accuracy by improving our model thanks to the resulting large data generation.

Also, the willingness to bridge data gaps for Mosquito dynamics is a real will help improving the data quality of Southern and Northern Hemisphere by opening the data collected to all world organizations, scientists and official data providers.

Besides the technological innovation, we are working on developing an open-source community for collaborative research around malaria as well as developing Smart Impact Bonds to attract philanthropic and venture capital into the project. 

Current number of people served: We are planning pilot tests in three communities, and are not yet on the market. 

Number of people served in one year: By end of 2022, we aim to install 10,000 RIPPLES and help protect 1 million people from mosquito-borne diseases. 

Number of people served in 5 years: By end of 2025, we aim to install 1 million RIPPLES and help protect 100 million people from the same. 

Our goal is to protect 100 million people from mosquito-borne epidemics by 2025. This is less than 10% of the annual global burden, and we believe it is well within reach. The impact can be measured at local level by monitoring the weekly cases of infection that each hospital near the deployment area detects. 

Since mosquitoes stay within 1km of their breeding site, our monitoring device can count mosquito populations representative of 1km radius. 

Hence where ever we install our mosquito control devices, we need to install one IoT Monitoring device to measure the reduction in mosquito population in the area. We can correlate this with clinical data from the nearest hospital treating the disease.

From the data side, our goal is to improve as much as we can the global data quality of southern and northern hemisphere, we will collect all data we can and make it available for official organizations.

We also want to put in place a consensus-based impact monitoring mechanism, where residents of a neighbourhood qualitatively verify if their neighbourhood is free from mosquito-breeding, biting and related disease or not. We are working with Singapore-based Oppi for this: Oppi.com. 

These will then integrate into our Proof-Of-Impact mechanism to issue Malaria Smart Impact Bonds.  

Full-time:

• Ashish Kapur, Co-founder / COO
• Pranav Agarwal, Co-founder /CEO 

Part-time: 

• Maneesh Rao, Fullstack Software/IoT architect 
• Rohan Kumar Bukane, Mechatronics expert, IIT Bombay

Advisors: 

• Danielle Winandy, ESG Transformation Manager - BNP Paribas
• Mitra Ardron, Executive Director of Natural Innovation, Serial social entrepreneur, Internet pioneer

Both, Pranav and Ashish, are 3rd year MSc. in Management students at ESSEC Business School with a shared passion for utilizing innovation and technology for generating a positive impact in the world.

About Ashish:

Ashish is a strong research-oriented individual who is skilled in critical thinking, design thinking, and continuous improvement. He has a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from BITS, Pilani and owns various accolades under his name. Owing to his diverse set of experiences, he is skilled at leading large teams and has worked extensively in high-stakes decision making situations.

About Pranav: 

Nominated for Forbes 30 Under 30, Pranav is passionate about leveraging technology to solve social and environmental challenges. Having a keen eye for innovation and disruptive tech, Pranav has bagged several awards and prizes for generating innovative world-changing ideas. 

Having a perfect blend of complementary skills to critically dissect a problem statement and a strong mix of managerial and technical skillset, we are certain of achieving a positive impact in the near future.

Moreover, we developed this prototype in 6 months, with less than $1000 in our pockets. Imagine where we can go with $500,000 and your help.  

About our Advisors:

With a huge experience and a very large network, our advisors are helping us to meet the right people in the right places and to increase our visibility in many countries.

The servant and futuristic leadership style are applied as business as usual. We test and we learn with and from many nationalities and countries that help us to evolve in a very diverse and equitable way.

We will be testing our devices in many different countries (Brazil, USA, La Réunion, Madagascar, etc...) by collaborating with local people and in the short term create potential new jobs in those countries.

Our goal is not only to save lives with Ripple, it is also to improve data quality, in Northern but more important in Southern Hemisphere and co-elevate scientists, world organizations, governments and official data providers to allow them to have better accuracy and quality in their predictive and actual international models.

We plan to collaborate with academia in this part of the project in order to give students the possibility to access and touch those technologies and improve their professional experience and by that we hope to support to cope with youth disillusionment (listed as major blind spot for World Economic Forum's Global Risks report 2021: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_2021.pdf

Our dream is to become an "impact unicorn": a term coined by Sir Ronald Cohen, which refers to a Tech4Good startup which impact over 1 billion people and to invite Esther Duflo to be the "godmother" of our solution.

We have been pitching our solution to European impact investors and VCs, but it is very hard to raise funds for such a "Bottom of the Pyramid" innovation. 

The prize and recognition by MIT Solve is one of our main hopes to keep the project alive and make an impact in the world! 

Human Capital: Need to find the right CTO and expert on data to overseas the technical part of the startup.

Financial: Need of raising funds to develop the 10.000 devices, shipping and delivery to have the first results in real time and real conditions.

Legal or Regulatory Matters: Need for strategic advice on local regulations in terms of Data Privacy.

Public relations: Need to connect with local NGO's, Governments and large corporates for business development.

Monitoring & evaluation: Need to create the right framework for data collection and data distribution to official players that could benefit from it, ensuring regulations compliance.

We would love to have Esther Duflo as "godmother" or mentor.

Universities Labs could be a real added value.

World Health Organization and UN, and Unicef for us are key to include as soon as we can in our project.

At least Health Ministry in Brazil (Ministério da Saude) to support our development in that country. Marcelo Queiroga 

Epidemiologists experts or water-borne diseases experts in their field. 

Dr Harsh Vardhan - Minister of Health and Family Welfare New Delhi

Professeur Jérôme Salomon - Directeur général de la Santé - Ministère des Solidarités et de la Santé - Paris

There is a lot to be done also in water-borne diseases in the US. So if we could get this prize we could allocate more efforts and focus on US minority communities.

We believe refugees are at high risk when it comes to water-borne diseases, so yes, we could love to win this prize and focus more on them also.

More importantly, we are in discussion with two NGOs in Somalia to be able to train refugees to install our devices in their neighborhoods, and thus provide them with livelihood and better health. This model, if successful can be used in other African, Asian and South American countries, for empowering refugees! 

One of our Advisors are a women and a very experienced women's advocate.

We believe that gender equality is key to our project as they are also the most impacted by water-borne diseases with children's and elderly.

Absolutely, our goal with data is to improve data quality for humanity and therefore also the AI for Humanity.

We see the Global Fund as a key partner for our quest to help eradicate malaria.

Firstly the Fund help finance and distribute the Ripple Mosquito Control, and given our objective of distributing 1 million of these by 2025, we need such resources! 

More importantly, today, there is no scalable solution to monitor in real-time the impact of any mosquito control effort, nor any real-time epidemic outbreak alerting system which takes into account actual mosquito populations in an area. Our Nymphea Monitor and data platform can help achieve just this through is bioacoustic mosquito identification and mapping technology. 

The Global Fund and field workers can leverage this monitoring technology in two ways: 

1. Monitor in real-time the impact of any mosquito control effort in a neighbourhood, and thus quantify the efficacy of its resource allocation

2. Help predict disease outbreaks with greater granularity, and thus divert and allocate resources such as essential medicines and health workers in real-time. 

Finally, our Malaria Smart Impact Bond can be a game-changer for maximising Social Return on Investment for any organisation investing in malaria eradication, namely the Global Fund.