Smartphone-based networks for earthquake detection

To enhance current earthquake early warning (EEW) systems, emerging technologies, including social and mobile computing, have been the focus of much attention. As smartphones have benefitted from significant development over the last few years, it is now possible to capture various kinds of motion using a smartphone's sensors, (e.g., accelerometer, GPS, etc.) including earthquake motion. To that end, we developed smartphone software to capture and backend analytics to determine whether the motion captured by a smartphone is caused by an earthquake or by human motion. In so doing, our goal is to establish a new type of seismic network using smartphones which enhance traditional seismic networks. In this paper, we evaluated the use of smartphones as detection devices; collected both human and simulated earthquake data using the smartphones, and developed an algorithm to distinguish earthquakes from human activities. Our results show that using our algorithms, a smartphone can not only be used as a recording instrument, but also a highly accurate earthquake detection tool. As a result, creating networks of seismic sensors based on smartphones will enhance the safety of communities vulnerable to earthquakes, worldwide.