Smart surveillance for smart cities: methods, operational considerations, and emerging technologies for urban dengue vector surveillance in Southeast Asia

Rapid urbanization in Southeast Asia has created complex, heterogeneous landscapes that facilitate the proliferation of Aedes mosquitoes, the primary vectors of dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and other arboviruses. Megacities present particular surveillance challenges because vector populations vary across neighborhoods, building types, microhabitats, and vertical levels, while conventional indices may provide incomplete information on adult abundance and transmission risk. This narrative review synthesizes conventional and emerging approaches for monitoring immature and adult Aedes mosquitoes in urban environments, with emphasis on how surveillance tools can be combined to answer operational public-health questions. We examine the strengths, limitations, operational requirements, and urban applicability of larval surveys, ovitraps, adult traps, automated monitoring, molecular approaches, remote sensing, community-based surveillance, and artificial-intelligence-enabled systems. Rather than treating individual tools as interchangeable, we consider surveillance design across horizontal and vertical urban strata and discuss how sampling intensity can be adapted to local heterogeneity, resource availability, and the decision that surveillance is intended to support. We further examine how entomological observations can be integrated with epidemiological data, weather, land use, urban morphology, and human mobility to identify areas requiring intensified investigation or control. The review proposes a decision-oriented and tiered framework in which low-cost or automated sentinel surveillance provides continuous situational awareness, while targeted field investigation is triggered by entomological, environmental, epidemiological, or model-based signals. This perspective provides practical guidance for developing scalable, context-appropriate surveillance systems for rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asian cities.