HomeTechnologyGadget or Real Weapon: Do Mosquito Repellent Apps Work?

Gadget or Real Weapon: Do Mosquito Repellent Apps Work?

Sometimes it is difficult or even impossible to get rid of mosquitoes in our environment. The apps claim to be “mosquito repellents,” but their effectiveness remains highly questionable.

As the summer holidays approach, the App Store and the Google Play Store are full of applications dedicated to combating a very particular pest: mosquitoes. Often ranking well in the rankings of “utility” applications, these tools theoretically offer an alternative to insecticides and other miracle products on the market.

In fact, the various apps offer a simple “low frequency sound” that is supposed to keep mosquitoes away from the environment. Thus, some indicate that the operation of the application is based on the principle that “the female mosquitoes hate the noise of the males, a statement that has not been scientifically proven, like the rest of the process.

“A Prank App”

Applications, such as “Mosquito Repellent-Insecticide”, the first application that appears after searching for “Anti-mosquito” in the App Store, for example, indicates several times in its description that it is more of a gadget than a real way of fight against mosquitoes.

And it is true that to date no scientific study has shown that low frequency sounds can have a repellent effect on mosquitoes. The researchers had already tested the experiment in 1985 using five devices that made specific sounds to try to keep four different species of mosquitoes away. Result: “For all species, there was no significant difference between times with and without the devices.”

Impossible ultrasound on smartphone

And even if the sound used did indeed influence the mosquito’s behavior, smartphones probably couldn’t relay it correctly. The anti-mosquito applications, in fact, use sounds of compressed quality, therefore of lower quality, which makes the exact transmission of ultrasound impossible.

The speakers of smartphones and other electronic devices are also not suitable for ultrasound diffusion. “Even good quality loudspeakers will not diffuse ultrasound correctly. Most are made according to human hearing sensitivity, that is, from 20 Hz to 20 KHz,” explained, for example, Thierry Aubin, a bioacoustician and research director at the CNRS, to France Info. in 2018.

However, the creation of these apps is still a blessing for their creators. Offered for free, they sometimes offer “premium” deals to remove ads, usually for a token euro. But in order to effectively fight mosquitoes, the use of such applications is still completely useless.

Author: julie ragot
Source: BFM TV

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