DengueChat:
A Platform for Community-Based Arbovirus Vector Control

Principal Investigator:  Professor James Holston
Co-Principal Investigator:  Josefina Coloma, PhD
Software Developers and Design Researchers:  Dimitri Skjorshammer, Cristhian Parra, PhD
Collaborators: Sustainable Sciences Institute, Managua
Funding:  UBS Optimus Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud, USAID, the Social Apps Lab, and CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) at the University of California, Berkeley.
denguechat.org

In 2012, I began to develop the social and software platform DengueChat with colleagues from the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley – especially Dr. Josefina Coloma – to promote community-based arbovirus vector control for disease prevention.  Its objective is to motivate residents to eliminate the mosquito Aedes aegypti that propagates such diseases as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya.

Since 2014, Dr. Coloma and I have worked with community organizations, residents, local government, and health workers to implement a pilot study of DengueChat in Managua, Nicaragua.  This study has had remarkable entomological success in reducing mosquito infestation and thus the risk of arbovirus disease.  DengueChat also expanded to pilot studies in Nicaragua for Zika (ZikaChat, 2017-19) and in Asunción, Paraguay, for dengue (2017-19).

DengueChat combines open source digital communication technologies (both web and mobile) with face-to-face assemblies.  It promotes resident participation in evidence collection, reporting, and analysis, and incorporates pedagogic information, key messaging, and game concepts to motivate communities to implement arbovirus vector control without the need for pesticides or larvicides.  In effect, the platform approaches arbovirus vector control as a problem of social mobilization and collaborative deliberation, in which the challenge is to translate residents’ knowledge of their neighborhoods into specific data of vector control as a means to motivate them to act.  Thus, DengueChat is a software application that articulates a social model of community organization based on assemblies with an intervention plan based on the participation of residents as essential to the collection, analysis, and ownership of data.  This articulation includes an evidence-gathering protocol based on house visits.

We conducted the initial pilot study in Managua (2014-16) with community-based youth brigades in 5 intervention neighborhoods and 5 control neighborhoods without the intervention. Entomological assessments throughout the study measured impact and showed significant risk reductions in disease transmission: Aedes aegypti larvae and pupae indices were reduced by 44% in neighborhoods using DengueChat during one epidemic year, while control neighborhoods experienced an increase of 507% during the same period. Overall, the house index was reduced by 71%, the container index by 83%, the Breteau index by 75%, the pupae per container by 99%, and the pupae per household by 99%, all with significance at confidence intervals of 95% in relation to control neighborhoods.

The pilot study in Managua demonstrated that a combination of socialware and software mobilized residents to produce community crowdsourced data about arboviral disease that are scientifically valid, abundant, and historically deep.  These data are crucial for both preventive and predictive policies of arbovirus control.  Thus, DengueChat motivated residents to change their behavior to fight the mosquito.  It demonstrated their competence to reduce entomological indices of Aedes aegypti infestation and therefore disease risk significantly.  

The achievement of DengueChat is to combine scientific significance and behavioral impact, through the engagement of sustainable teams of citizen entomologists.  The pedagogy of DengueChat leads residents to understand the “life cycle of the mosquito” and how to interrupt it.  Moreover, using DengueChat shifts the power structure of vector control from government agencies to the neighborhood households where residents, organized into assemblies, can achieve source reduction within their properties and with their own resources. We consider these realizations to constitute an important advance in the enabling conditions that contribute effectively to disease prevention.

 For an analysis of the Managua pilot study of DengueChat, see James Holston, Harold Suazo, Eva Harris, and Josefina Coloma. 2021 DengueChat: a social and software platform for community-based arbovirus vector control.  American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. [Link to open access version under “Articles” tab]