mZap! A mobile, community-based GPS mapping surveillance tool empowering communities to alleviate insect-borne disease and ecological risk in Costa Rica

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A broad range of insect vectors carry disease in Costa Rica’s diverse ecology, causing substantial common outbreaks of Dengue, Chikungunya, Chagas, and, now, Zika. Vector control as a strategy for primary prevention of insect-borne disease often fails due to broad chemical and biological, geographically-based tactics (e.g., community spraying) proving ineffective or unacceptable to communities, or inconsistent individual behavior or difficult-to-implement strategies at the personal level. Communities, however, have large, untapped resources in motivated civil and social groups, local businesses, and informal organizations that could facilitate environmental remediation (removing insect breeding sites, reducing hotspots). These sources are rarely, if ever, engaged in vector control strategies, nor are the large tourist populations arriving in Costa Rica who are often interested in assisting the communities they visit. Untapped community mobilization represents an opportunity for technological innovation that leverages widespread mobile phone use and internet access to enhance the human behavior aspect of vector control. As crowdsensing-based applications (e.g., Waze, Moovit) and games (e.g., Pokémon GO) have shown, app users can collaborate virtually to effect group behavior using shared, dynamic knowledge. This combination of need, technology, and behavioral-community dynamics provides a unique opportunity for vector control in areas impacted by insect-borne disease. This project proposed - termed Zancudos, Ambiente y Proteccion, or ¡mZAP! - leverages an NIH-funded, two- decade relationship between the University of Rochester and Costa Rica to: 1) Create a novel, community- driven, GPS-based theoretically-informed smart device application coupled with a publicly-available, social media-enabled, web-based map to crowdsource insect risks; 2) Identify and demonstrate community strategies for app-driven remediation of insect habitats; and, 3) Evaluate the use and utility of engaging local community and tourist populations to help identify insect risk and crowdsource app-based action. The resulting ¡mZAP! tools help enable communities, households, and individuals to identify, report, and act around habitat risks that relate to insect-based disease control. ¡mZAP! is theoretically-informed to address individual and collective behavior, fundamentally organized around participatory design, and systematically managed from concept to prototyping and demonstration. ¡mZAP! will be developed and demonstrated in several Costa Rican communities representing different social and ecological contexts. The project will be implemented through a demonstrated, existing NIH-funded partnership that supports ICT development and testing in communities, infused by South-South expertise from another UR-based, CDC-funded global network partnership in Puerto Rico. ¡MZAP! represents a paradigm shift, providing the first community-based, crowdsourced system of its kind that could help demonopolize and democratize technological intervention enabling communities to participate in ecological vector-control processes from which they often feel excluded.