Before Covid-19 shut down Guangzhou, authorities in the province in China’s subtropical south were preoccupied with another virus: dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that causes chills and muscle pains. The aedes mosquito that spreads the virus thrives in standing water, so officials in the central Tianhe district wanted to clear puddles from the roofs of buildings. But checking and monitoring all the rooftops—which mostly look like one another—was laborious and prone to error.
So in 2017 the district started using a system from HiAR, an augmented reality company. Local officials flew drones over the rooftops, marking any that had puddles. That information was then sent in real time to a dashboard,
→ Continue reading at WIRED
