as well as resulting in more pesticides. In hotels, a bed bug infestation can cost a property up to £55,000 a year through loss of business, reputation damage, staff time spent on the problem and treatment costs.
A range of semi-automated solutions exist in the pest control marketplace. Other detection techniques include specially- trained sniffer dogs and adding a visual inspection to already-busy housekeeping teams. Seeking to provide a fully- automated system, Spotta Smart Pest Systems launched the Bed Pod in 2019; the service is targeted at multi-room accommodation businesses such as hotels and care homes, and offers continuous monitoring and identification of bed bugs in real time via AI-driven algorithms.
Case Study: Proactive monitoring
Spotta Smart Pest System’s Bed Pod provides hotels with a fully automated early detection option. In its first year of operation, the Bed Pod was found to have reduced the amount of bed bug incidents discovered by hotel guests from 50% to just 3.3% in its customers’ properties.
The ‘always-on’ monitoring service uses AI-driven recognition technology to identify insects and provide real time alerts enabling hotels, other accommodation providers and their pest control partners to identify occurrences of bed bugs and treat the problem early, limiting the damage the pests can cause.
Following its first year of real-world deployment in customer hotels – servicing over 91,000 room nights – 52.2% of detections made by Spotta were in rooms with no recent history of bed bugs, demonstrating the system’s effectiveness as an early warning against new infestations. Repeat detections in rooms helped hoteliers assess whether extermination treatments were successful or they needed further, deeper treatment.
www.tomorrowscleaning.com
Across the 12-month period, Spotta was the first to identify bed bugs in 94.2% of cases, significantly reducing the number of guest encounters with the pests in multi-room properties with 3.3% of cases being found first by guests. Housekeeping staff identified the remaining 2.5% of cases, highlighting the difficulty in the human eye spotting and identifying the tiny pests.
Using AI to improve pest management
Artificial Intelligence has been adopted by many industries to improve services and products: facial recognition allows for log-in to personal computers and phones; Netflix uses machine learning to provide personalised viewing recommendations; and AI makes decisions around heating and cooling of buildings, to maximise efficiency in temperature control.
New technologies offer long-term cost-saving and improved efficiency measures, which will help reduce operational costs and balance demands of staff workloads. As hygiene and wellbeing comes under scrutiny from the public as businesses reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, improving pest control is essential to providing peace of mind to guests and customers.
Strategically placed ‘smart’ devices analyse pests through image sensors and machine learning, which informs facilities staff of the type of pest so it can be dealt with appropriately. This reduces human monitoring and training requirements, while also enabling cleaning and facilities management teams and pest controllers to be responsive with the right kind of treatment.
Having the right data to understand the problem and shape the appropriate solution is essential in minimising business risk caused by pests.
www.spotta.co PEST CONTROL | 29
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