Wim Glorieux is not an entomologist. He’s not a pest-control expert, either. But the Belgian engineer believes he has found an effective way for hoteliers and other property managers to reduce the financial impacts caused by bedbugs. And he’s leveraging the Internet of Things to do it.
To property managers, bedbugs are pernicious for a number of reasons. The insects, which generally arrive in a property by hitching a ride in luggage or furniture, live off human or animal blood and remain inactive during the day but, like mosquitoes, are drawn to the carbon dioxide exhaled by their prey. While they do not spread disease or create any major human health risk, the bites are an itchy nuisance. They are very difficult to eliminate because DDT, the chemical that historically was most effective in eradicating them, is now banned. Applying very high heat to infested rooms is the best way to kill bedbugs, but that, as well as the follow-up monitoring required (often done with specially trained beagles that can sniff out the presence of bedbugs), is very expensive.
According to a Businessweek article from 2007, a hotel could spend $60,000 to respond to a large infestation. What’s more, bedbugs bring with them an exceptionally negative stigma, even though their presence is not correlated with unclean spaces or poor housekeeping. For hotels and apartment buildings, this stigma means that an infestation comes with reputational costs, as well as direct costs.
Glorieux’s startup, GUPSY (which stands for global urban positioning and sensor system), has developed a device that attracts bedbugs by emitting CO2. Once they crawl inside the device, the bedbugs, which cannot fly, become trapped. A built-in camera takes periodic images, and an algorithm, developed by Glorieux, analyzes those images and determines the quantity and type (adult versus juvenile) of bedbugs that are present. “If you see just a large one, that’s one thing,” he says, “but if there are also small bedbugs present, that is very bad because it shows they have begun reproducing in that room.”
The bug count would be transmitted wirelessly, via the LoRa protocol for low-power wide area networks (LPWAN), to a gateway device in the building and would then be forwarded on to a cloud-based server. From there, an alert would be issued to hotel personnel or the building manager, or to the building’s pest-management company, if the owners use one.
The bedbug monitor is not the first device Glorieux has developed that seeks to help organizations control pests, nor is it the first time he has opted for a LPWAN communication network. GUPSY also sells a temperature sensor and communications module that Glorieux designed specifically to be integrated into a mousetrap, in order to make it more effective and accurate. GUPSY sells this module to Anticimex, a pest control management company, which has added the module to 15,000 of its mice traps, deployed in warehouses operated by companies in the food and beverage industry, according to Glorieux.
To prevent traps from being triggered accidentally, such as when they are bumped with enough force to trigger the switch, the switch inside the modified trap is tripped both by pressure and by a slight increase in the temperature inside the trap (indicating a mouse is within). After the trapped is triggered, the integrated LoRa-compliant radio transmits an alert, along with the trap’s identification number, to the nearest gateway device. Anticimex then receives this alert and can dispatch a technician to empty the trap.
Initially, the mousetrap communication module used a protocol based on the ZigBee protocol, but Glorieux says that for it and the other IoT devices he is developing for applications in transportation, medicine and building automation, he is now focused solely on LPWANs. “I use LoRa [-compliant radios] across the board now,” he says. “I changed because the [ZigBee] read range was too short, which meant we needed too many routers.”
LoRa-based radios support read ranges of up to 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) in urban settings and up to 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) in rural areas.
Glorieux says he considered integrating small CO2 canisters into the bedbug monitor, but the largest canister that would feasibly fit into the device could only hold one month’s worth of the gas, and replacing the canisters monthly would require too much maintenance. Instead, he settled on a system by which a small drop of oil (he is using paraffin oil) is dropped onto a super-heated surface—more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit)—inside the device. The heat causes the oil to combust, releasing CO2 and water.
The device was selected as a finalist in a contest, called the Global IoT Challenge for Innovation, conducted by the LoRa Alliance, an industry group that is seeking to standardize the LoRa protocol. The winner will be selected at a LoRa Alliance event early next month in California.
Glorieux says he had been thinking about developing a networked bedbug monitoring device for some time, but the LoRa Alliance contest was the spark that got him more motivated. “A few days before Christmas, I got an e-mail about the contest, and I had to present my product in three weeks,” he says. “Here in Europe, no one is working at that time of year. I had to find a company that could do the technical drawings for the product, but I was finally able to get [design and product engineering firm] GBO to do the drawing.”
He then used a 3D printer to create the aluminum shell of the prototype device, though he says he may stick with 3D printing for the shell once he moves it to production.
The bedbug monitor will not eliminate bedbugs, Glorieux says, but it is designed to give building managers advance warning to their presence. Knowing whether a given room has only one or two bugs or a larger infestation will also help managers to determine which rooms need to be treated first. The monitors, which are powered by wall mains, are designed to be used continuously in order to provide early warnings about the appearance of new bedbugs. This would be especially important for hotels, since bedbugs arrive in luggage and, therefore, rooms are continuously susceptible to new infestations.
GUPSY will begin pilot tests with hotels this month, and expects to have the monitoring system commercially available by summer. Glorieux estimates that the monitors will cost somewhere between $330 and $550 apiece, while the gateway device will . Hotels spend around $20 per room to have manual bedbug inspections performed (using dogs or human inspectors), he notes, so if those inspections were conducted once monthly, the monitor could generate a per-room return on investment within less than a year. The LoRa gateway device will be available in a single band (868MHz, 915MHz or 433MHz) or a dual-band (433MHz/868MHz) configuration, priced at $495 or $715 respectively. (Note that GUPSY is based in the Netherlands and prices were are converted from the Euro.) A single gateway could provide adequate coverage to most hotels, Glorieux says, as long as it is well positioned in the center of the building.
Correction: The original version of this article said that Glorieux is Dutch. In fact, he is Belgian.