This App Will Turn Your Smartphone into an Earthquake Detector

Seismologists and app developers are shaking things up with a new app that transforms smart phones 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.

Crowd sourcing 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.

How it works

Accelerometers measure forces related to acceleration: vibration, tilt and movement, and also the static force of gravity's pull. In smart phones, 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 smart phones 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, 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.

It's about looking at the amplitude and the frequency content of the earthquake 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.

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.

For now, the app will only collect and transmit data to the central processor. But the end goal 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. For seismologists, the more data they can gather about earthquakes, the better. A bigger data pool means an improved understanding of quake behaviour, 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.