Team:ColumbiaU NYC/Integrated Practices

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Consumer Analysis

Our team realized that in order to engineer a product to prevent mosquito bites we needed to engage with the community at large to understand the problem from a holistic perspective. Thus, we designed a 20 item survey to assess the knowledge of the community regarding mosquito repellent and mosquito borne illnesses, which we distributed to over 250 people via the website SurveyMonkey. The survey reached people in more than twenty states and four countries.

The inferential statistics revealed that people suffer from mosquito bites year round even though people use repellent. However, most people did not know whether the repellent contained the highly toxic component DEET, which indicates a void in safety knowledge. Of those who used DEET, there was no correlation found between use of DEET based mosquito repellent and perceived effectiveness. Thus, we compiled a list of frequently asked questions about mosquito repellent use as a prevention strategy for mosquito borne illnesses, answered them, and distributed the information to local schools to enhance community knowledge. We also wanted to ensure that our mosquito repellent would be need of our community so we included a few market analysis questions in which participants ranked the importance of mosquito repellent characteristics such as color and smell that we considered throughout our research.

Figure 1
Figure 1: Use of mosquito repellent in the community
Figure 2
Figure 2: Knowledge of mosquito repellent components
Figure 3
Figure 3: Correlation between use of DEET and perceived repellent effectiveness
Figure 4
Figure 4: Importance of mosquito repellent qualities to community

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