SnakeID Challenge

Venomous snakebites are responsible for over half a million deaths and disabilities every year, mostly affecting poor and rural communities. One of the reasons for this global health crisis is the difficulty of accurately identifying the snake that has bitten a person, and the resulting risk that the wrong antidote is administered.

The SnakeID challenge is an application that crowdsources the skills of amateur herpetologists to identify snakes. The ultimate goal is to identify snakes automatically based on a smartphone image, using machine learning algorithms trained with crowdsourced data. Identifying venomous snakes rapidly and accurately this way can improve health outcomes, while helping to track snake biodiversity.

SnakeID Challengehas been developed in collaboration with the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, the World Health Organization, Doctors without Borders, and other partners worldwide.

Snake Data Collection

Researchers at the University of Geneva used SDG Kobo to collect a set of cross-sectoral surveys at national level in Cameroon and Nepal. The survey included several elements of snakebite as a neglected tropical disease, covering the widest possible variety of aspects of human and animal health, as well as economic, social, and environmental factors.

”It was a great advantage to be able to design and deploy by ourselves a complex, multi-layered survey, in a free and open-source application and at the same time, to manage and store the results locally” (UniGe main investigators).