Skip to main content

Turn Your Smartphone Into An Earthquake Detector


'MyShake' App Turns Your Smartphone into Earthquake Detector

by Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer
Date: 



Smartphone earthquake detection will help seismologists study quakes and could inform early-warning system design.
CREDIT: Narongsak Nagadhana

Seismologists and app developers are shaking things up with a new app that transforms smartphones into personal earthquake detectors.
By tapping into a smartphone's accelerometer — the motion-detection instrument — the free Android app, called MyShake, can pick up and interpret nearby quake activity, estimating the earthquake's location and magnitude in real-time, and then relaying the information to a central database for seismologists to analyze.
In time, an established network of users could enable MyShake to be used as an early- warning system, the researchers said. [The 10 Biggest Earthquakes in History]
Crowdsourcing quakes
Seismic networks worldwide detect earthquakes and convey quake data to scientists around the clock, providing a global picture of the tremors that are part of Earth's ongoing dynamic processes. But there are areas where the network is thin, which means researchers are missing pieces in the seismic puzzle. However, "citizen- scientists" with smartphones could fill those gaps, according to Richard Allen, leader of the MyShake project and director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in California.
"As smartphones became more popular and it became easier to write software that would run on smartphones, we realized that we had the potential to use the accelerometer that runs in every smartphone to record earthquakes," Allen told Live Science.
How it works
Accelerometers measure forces related to acceleration: vibration, tilt and movement, and also the static force of gravity's pull. In smartphones, accelerometers detect changes in the device's orientation, allowing the phone to know exactly which end is up and to adjust visual displays to correspond to the direction it's facing.
Fitness apps for smartphones use accelerometers to pinpoint specific changes in motion in order to calculate the number of steps you take, for example. And the MyShake app is designed to recognize when a smartphone's accelerometer picks up the signature shaking of an earthquake, Allen said, which is different from other types of vibrating motion, or "everyday shaking."
In fact, the earthquake-detection engine in MyShake is designed to recognize an earthquake's vibration profile much like a fitness app recognizes steps, according to Allen.
"It's about looking at the amplitude and the frequency content of the earthquake," Allen said, "and it's quite different from the amplitude and frequency content of most everyday shakes. It's very low-frequency energy and the amplitude is not as big as the amplitude for most everyday activities."
In other words, the difference between the highs and lows of the motion generated by an earthquake are smaller than the range you'd find in other types of daily movement, he said.
Quake, rattle and roll
When a smartphone's MyShake app detects an earthquake, it instantly sends an alert to a central processing site. A network detection algorithm is activated by incoming data from multiple phones in the same area, to "declare" an earthquake, identify its location and estimate its magnitude, Allen said.
For now, the app will only collect and transmit data to the central processor. But the end goal, Allen said, is for future versions of the app to send warnings back to individual users.
An iPhone version of the app will also be included in future plans for MyShake, according to Allen.For seismologists, the more data they can gather about earthquakes, the better, Allen said. A bigger data pool means an improved understanding of quake behavior, which could help experts design better early warning systems and safety protocols, things that are especially critical in urban areas prone to frequent quake activity. With 2.6 billion smartphones currently in circulation worldwide and an anticipated 6 billion by 2020, according to an Ericsson Mobility Report released in 2015, a global network of handheld seismic detectors could go a long way toward keeping people safe by improving quake preparation and response.
The findings were published online today (Feb. 12) in the journal Science Advances, and the MyShake app is available for download atmyshake.berkeley.edu.

Comments

Post a Comment

Top

Apple Hacked By A 16 Year Old Teen !

 A Teenage boy pleeded guillty to hack into Apple internal database The 16-year-old accessed 90 gigabytes worth of files, breaking into the system many times over the course of a year from his suburban home in Melbourne, reports The Age newspaper. It says he stored the documents in a folder called 'hacky hack hack'.👻 Apple insists that no customer data was compromised. But The Age reports that the boy had accessed customer accounts. In a statement to the BBC, Apple said: "We vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats. "In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement. "We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised." According to stateme...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Controller controls all your consoles

Am here to introduce to you the All controller for all standard game consoles... Remember the third party controller your sibling/cousin/friend made you use when you visited his or her house in the NES days? Remember the pain you felt when the joystick wasn’t quite right and they were hosing you on Mortal Kombat while you were busy trying to figure out why your character kept kicking? Well the  All Controller isn’t like that at all. The All Controller is a third party project that, in theory, can be used on any console. You can set up macros and speed buttons and connect to the Xbox, the PS4, or the Switch. It also has a 40 hour battery and can connect to PCs. “Connecting to consoles will be as easy as plugging in the custom USB adapter,” write the creators. “This device will allow the ALL Controller to connect to the XBox 360, XBox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Added support for Nintendo Wii, WiiU and Switch will be added as well. On top of that, the USB adapter wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Supercomputer Can Calculate in 1 Second What Would Take You 6 Billion Years

It's shiny, fast and ultrapowerful. But it's not the latest Alpha Romeo. A physics laboratory in Tennessee just unveiled Summit, likely to be named the world's speediest and smartest supercomputer. Perhaps most exciting for the U.S.? It's faster than China's. Hot 100 smartphones The supercomputer — which fills a server room the size of two tennis courts — can spit out answers to 200 quadrillion (or 200 with 15 zeros) calculations per second, or 200 petaflops, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the supercomputer resides. "If every person on Earth completed one calculation per second, it would take the world population 305 days to do what Summit can do in 1 second," according to an ORNL statement. Put another way, if one person were to run the calculations, hypothetically, it would take 2.3 trillion days, or 6.35 billion years. [9 Super-Cool Uses for Supercomputers] The former "world's fastest supercomputer," called S...
Post a Comment
Read more