Detect earthquakes with your smartphone, it's possible!

Detect earthquakes with your smartphone, it's possible!

MyShake. This is the name of this application for Android and iOS which uses the accelerometer present in smartphones to detect movements of the earth.

Natural disasters not only cause significant damage, but they still result in the loss of many human lives today. Often the number of victims is greatly reduced if the population is warned in time. This is the case with earthquakes, and some countries, such as South Korea, Mexico, Japan and Taiwan, have already set up seismograph networks and an alert system that warns the population before the start of the earthquake. However, current systems are limited and expensive to set up.

A group of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley came up with an idea to create a system at a lower cost. Rather than deploying expensive equipment, they decided to take advantage of a technology that already covers the whole territory: smartphones.

Free, the application works in the background and records earth shakes day and night. © UC Berkeley

Soon to be integrated directly into iOS or Android?

Researchers have released an app called MyShake, which works on iOS and Android and uses the accelerometer on mobile devices to detect earthquakes. Thanks to a study on 100 volunteers, they learned to differentiate the movements due to normal use of the tremors of an earthquake. The application can detect an earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or more, in which case it sends an alert.

Of course, an alert from a single device does not allow an earthquake to be concluded. However, in 2016 an earthquake of magnitude 5.2 was detected by more than 200 smartphones. To date, more than 320,000 people have installed the app worldwide. Researchers imagine integrating technology into a popular application or directly into the mobile operating system to quickly create a global network capable of detecting earthquakes and sending an alert wherever humans are present.