Carrying out surveys on hard to reach populations in far flung parts of the world can be challenging and expensive. But researchers from the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health at the University of Oxford have used freely available satellite images to help identify and sample households in Thailand and Laos, as part of a research project looking at medicine and health behaviours. Ahead of their presentation at the 2018 Research Methods Festival, we catch up with Marco Haenssgen and Ern Charoenboon in the middle of their field work to discuss how their work will help other researchers save money whilst gathering data that could help the global health crisis of our growing resistance to antibiotics.