Deutsche Telekom and the University of California, Berkeley have launched the MyShake app. Developed by UC Berkeley and the Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Silicon Valley, the application taps into a smartphone’s ability to record ground shaking from an earthquake, with the goal of creating a worldwide seismic detection network that could eventually warn users of impending jolts from nearby quakes.
Especially for many earthquake-prone developing countries such as Nepal or Peru, MyShake could warn potentially affected persons valuable seconds earlier and, ideally, safe lives. The free Android app is available to the public from the Google Play store. An iPhone app is also planned.
MyShake is based on an algorithm developed by UC Berkeley seismologists. Programmers of the Silicon Valley Innovation Centre, which is part of the Deutsche Telekom T-Labs, turned it into an app. For now, the app only collects information from the smartphone’s built-in accelerometers, analyses it and, if it corresponds to the vibrational profile of a quake, relays the time and amplitude of the shaking as well as the phone’s GPS coordinates to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory for analysis.
Cloud-based software constantly reviews all incoming data and, if at least four phones detect shaking and this represents more than 60 percent of all phones within a 10-kilometer radius of the epicentre, the programme confirms an earthquake. The researchers cross-check this with the California Integrated Seismic Network, which monitors earth movement all over the state using underground seismometers.
The app continually records accelerometer data, and after a confirmed earthquake will also send five minutes of data to the researchers, starting one minute before the quake and ending four minutes after. This happens only when the phone is connected to a WLAN network, however.
MyShake runs in the background with little power, allowing the phone’s on-board accelerometers to record local shaking at any time of the day or night without constricting the user.
