Procedia Engineering 107 (2015) 194 – 204 1877-7058 © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of HumTech2015 doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2015.06.074 ScienceDirect Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Humanitarian Technology: Science, Systems and Global Impact 2015, HumTech2015 In-situ and remote sensing networks for environmental monitoring and global assessment of leptospirosis outbreaks Andreas N. Skouloudis a *, David G. Rickerby a a Institute for Environment and Sustainablity, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, TP263, via Enrico Fermi 2749, Ispra, I-21027, Italy Abstract Leptospirosis is a disease that affects human population and can claim many victims with large outbreaks associated with natural disasters. This work focuses on the technological aspects for inexpensive climate monitoring techniques based on ground and satellite sensors for obtaining information prior to disease outbreaks in under-developed regions and on water-quality sensors that can lead to radical changes in our ability to detect and abate this disease. The remote deployment of such sensors in areas where outbreaks can occur can help in enhancing in real-time the spatial and temporal resolution of information and allows unattended operation that will be particularly useful for monitoring under extreme climate events. Such types of monitoring advancements, when coupled with regular geographical, population and habitat monitoring can assess the hazards and risks to local population prior to a disease outbreak. Then in the eventual aftermath, it can assist in identification of affected geographical locations where abatement solutions will be required, and eventually in the assessment of the effectiveness of control measures. This work explores recent releases of open global observation data and a range of in-situ environmental monitoring tools of increasing complexity for measuring several parameters and for detecting contaminants and pathogens that were previously irresolvable due to the high degree of complexity in the diagnosis of this disease. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of HumTech2015. Keywords: Environment and climate monitoring; leptospirosis; remote ground and satellite sensors; warnings amd outbreak assessments 1. Introduction and the nature of the disease Leptospirosis is a zoonotic disease that became recently a major public health problem and a cause of significant morbidity and mortality among impoverished populations [1]. This disease originates from zoonotic pathogens * Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-333-5941778; fax +39-0332-785628. E-mail address: andreas.skouloudis@jrc.ec.europa.eu © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of HumTech2015