This machine monitors mosquitoes to find—and stop—pandemics before they start
Microsoft’s Premonition platform—a winner of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards—tracks, captures, and analyzes mosquitoes, to give health officials a sense of what pathogens are circulating in the area.
BY ADELE PETERS
In the wake of the 2014 Ebola outbreak that killed thousands of people in West Africa, a researcher at Microsoft began to wonder how better technology could help better track and prevent the spread of disease. The virus had reemerged 2,500 miles away from the last previous outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” One of the rarest viruses on the planet suddenly jumped out in a place we didn’t expect,” says Ethan Jackson, the researcher, who now directs a program called Premonition that focuses on the problem. “It impacted the whole world in a really short amount of time. As somebody who worked in autonomous systems, I wanted to understand why we didn’t have more data about that. What would it take to get the sort of data so that we could predict events like that, and what systems would we need to build?”