Smart pest monitoring system marks one year of real-world operations, detecting bed bugs in 94.2% of cases
In its first year of operation, Spotta’s monitoring and detection system identified bed bugs in 94.2% of cases, significantly reducing the number of encounters between bed bugs and residents in multi-room properties.
The affordable, ‘always-on’ monitoring service uses computer vision technology to identify insects and provide real time alerts. Spotta enables multi-room properties such as sheltered and residential housing accommodation and their pest control partners to identify occurrences of bed bugs and treat the problem early, limiting the damage caused by, and spread of, the pests.
During its first year of real-world deployment in customer properties, Spotta protected over 91,000 room nights. Of the detections made by Spotta, over half (52.2%) were in rooms with no recent history of bed bugs, proving the system’s effectiveness as an early warning against new infestations. Repeat detections in rooms help property managers assess whether extermination treatments are successful or if further, more extensive treatment is needed.
Robert Fryers, co-founder and CEO of Spotta says,
“For accommodation providers, most of the overall financial impact of bed bugs comes from contact between the occupant and pests, which leads to complaints, disruption and high treatment costs.”
During the Bed Pod’s first year, 94.2% of cases were successfully detected by Spotta, with room residents reporting bed bugs accounting for just 3.3% of cases and staff identifying the remaining 2.5%.
Fryers continues:
“Defining success for the Bed Pod has always been ‘Does it alert the owner/operator to the presence of bed bugs before an occupant discovers them?’. Our customers had previously experienced a best case 50% success rate in detection through their existing monitoring methods (and many were far worse than this) – meaning 1 in 2 bed bug incidents were first reported by occupants. With Spotta, we’ve been able to reduce this to just 3.3%.”
Traditional monitoring methods for bed bugs include sniffer dogs, pre-scheduled visits from professional pest controllers/inspectors, and training staff to conduct manual inspections. With bed bugs growing to a maximum of just 5mm in length, they are hard to distinguish with the naked eye resulting in understandable occurences of missed identification.
Fryers concludes:
“The first year results of Bed Pod show we have a credible, proven solution with real-world efficacy. This is transformative for accommodation providers, property managers and their pest control partners. Spotta replaces old, reactive methods with automatic, proactive monitoring for bed bugs.”
Find out more at spotta.co