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Tech

The Anti-Mosquito Patch Is a Crowdfunding Juggernaut

Is the magical crowdfunding formula a humanitarian cause that even the wealthy want to buy?

As I was out in the woods over the weekend, the bug spray was keeping the mosquitoes from biting, but it sure wasn’t keeping them away from me and out of my ears. That high-pitched whine is enough to drive you nuts. It feels like it’s not enough to just to repel the buggers, I don’t want them attracted to me at all. I don't want mosquitoes knowing that I exist.

And I’m probably not alone in this, which might explain why the most popular campaign on Indiegogo right now is a sticker that claims to cloak you from mosquitoes.

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The Kite Patch uses “food grade, FDA-approved compounds” that inhibit the mosquitoes’ carbon dioxide receptors, making you invisible to the would-be bloodsuckers. They’re not yet sure how big of a cloak it creates, or how the patch’s effectiveness is hurt by wind or rain, but their crowdfunding video is optimistic, bordering on downright euphoria.

The proto-Kite was developed at University of California Riverside, and was backed by financial heavy-hitters like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. According the Kite website, “the intellectual property was then exclusively licensed with worldwide rights to ieCrowd and placed into Olfactor Laboratories, Inc., its subsidiary.”

The crowdfunding campaign blew through its initial goal in just four days and has already raised over 640 percent of its goal, with more than two weeks still to go. The first $75,000 was going towards field-testing the patch in Uganda, where, in some regions, over 60 percent of children have malaria. With over $400,000 pledged, the field tests have been expanded to testing 100,000 patches over three sites in sub-Saharan country.

The campaign’s video hits the idea of replacing toxic insect repellents pretty hard, but for most of us in America, repellents that use the chemical DEET work just fine, some ear-buzzing not withstanding. The Environmental Protection Agency concluded after a 1998 safety review that “as long as consumers follow label directions and take proper precautions, insect repellents containing DEET do not present a health concern.” The study put DEET in Category III, as “slightly toxic,” one step above Category IV “practically non-toxic,” and noted that misapplication is at fault when

Of course most Americans have the luxury of getting to come inside, wash the DEET off, as the products recommend, and then not worry about more mosquitoes. In countries where people are sleeping under insecticide-soaked nets because the bugs enter their homes freely, the story is different. Knowing that DEET has been “implicated in seizures among children,” as the EPA puts it, is probably enough for people to want for an alternative, especially if they have to wear it perpetually.

Is the Kite Patch that alternative? It’s not clear yet how effective it can be outside the laboratories. One thing that’s for certain is that the cost will need to come way down from the 5 patches for $10 that it’s at now. The average monthly household income in Uganda is less than $120, which means that keeping a family of four patched for a month would pretty much take it all. Of course the research and development phase is always expensive, which is why the Kite Patch is counting on crowdfunding now that its grants are gone.

Riding high on the winds of its successful crowdfunding campaign and with attendant media coverage that reaches now all the way to Motherboard, the pressure is now on Kite to deliver where other, non-sprays have failed. Ultrasonic clickers, bug zappers, bats–none of them deliver very effectively. The best low-tech solution is just a low-powered fan, taking advantage of the fact that mosquitoes are fairly weak fliers.

More generally though, the Kite Patch has found a potentially lucrative niche in crowdfunding, one that future campaigns might do well to keep in mind. Namely, they're promising to develop a product with humanitarian implications that people with money really, really want.