Date: Aug 08, 2013 Source: PCMag (
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The Kite Mosquito Patch, an adhesive square that pumps out a cocktail of people-safe chemicals to ward of bothersome blood-suckers, is generating some solid buzz on the crowd-funding scene.
With 22 days left in its Indiegogo campaign, Kite had already hauled in more than $430,000 as of Thursday, well over the $75,000 target the venture originally set out to raise. The patch, which Kite says "allows humans to go virtually undetected by mosquitoes for up to 48 hours," has been the subject of glowing reports by Wired, Medical Daily, and PCMag sister site Geek.com.
The patch itself is perhaps a shade larger than a first-stage nicotine patch. The difference is that users don't have to attach the Kite Mosquito Patch directly to their skin—it can be fixed to clothing. Kite hasn't received EPA approval for its patch in the United States yet—that's part of why it's trying to raise money via the crowd-funding campaign—but the developers of the product assure us that the compounds used are safe and non-toxic.
Those chemicals won't harm Kite Mosquito Patch wearers, but they will drive mosquitoes batty by disrupting the insects' ability to track humans, Kite says. The effect, as Geek's Graham Templeton put it, is to create an "invisibility cloak" that mosquito sensors can't penetrate.
This all works courtesy of a patent-pending compound developed by Riverside, Calif.-based Olfactor Laboratories which inhibits insects' ability to detect the C02 in human exhalations by gumming up their C02 receptors with an airborne dispersal of the compound. With the patch on, a handy cloud of this mosquito-confusing stuff surrounds your person and hey, presto—the mozzies leave you alone.
And while folks in cooler climates will surely welcome a mosquito-repelling solution that doesn't involve lathering oneself in nasty bug spray, the real potential benefit of the Kite Mosquito Patch is for people living in the tropics, where malaria, dengue fever, and other mosquito-borne diseases pose a deadly threat, according to Kite.
To that end, the developers say they'll use the funds raised by their Indiegogo campaign to manufacture enough Kite patches to conduct "large-scale testing in Uganda [which] will simultaneously provide over 1 million hours of protection during a large field test for families who are suffering from malaria infection rates of over 60 percent and allow us to optimize Kite before we begin scaling for global distribution."
In addition to its crowd-sourced capital, Kite has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation among other investors.
Olfactor Laboratories is also developing other products which use this compound and variations of it, including "a new larvacide application that can be used to control the growth of insect colonies without impacting water quality, or human and ecological safety ... a power-free mosquito trapping system used in conjunction with OLI's insect lures ... [and] new insect baits which mimic mosquito food sources but that cannot be digested by mosquitoes."
