Smartphones are becoming more than just communication and entertainment devices, as they have started to serve more practical functions such as a disaster detection device. Developers, for instance, have teamed up with seismologists and unveiled an app Friday called MyShake that effectively transforms smartphones into earthquake detectors.
Unlike the elaborate infrastructure seen in the ShakeAlert system, MyShake only relies on the smartphone's accelerometer to detect quake activity. Its algorithm allows the app to estimate the earthquake's location and magnitude, CBS News reported. This information is then forwarded to a central database, where seismologists analyze data real-time.
"We show that smartphones can record magnitude 5 earthquakes at distances of 10 km or less and develop an on-phone detection capability to separate earthquakes from other everyday shakes," the app's developers explained in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
The app works within the so-called "crowdsourcing quakes" concept, wherein usage can establish a network that can collect information. This will supposedly make MyShake a reliable early-warning system. "This is a citizen science project," Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory at UC Berkeley, told The Los Angeles Times. "This is an app that provides information, education, motivation - to the people who've downloaded it - to get ready for earthquakes. Those same people are contributing to our further understanding of earthquakes, because they're collecting data that will help us better understand the earthquake process."
MyShake is currently available for Android devices. There is no word yet on if it will also get ported to the iOS platform.
