New smartphone app to alert users before an earthquake

New smartphone app to alert users before an earthquake

A group of US researchers have developed a new smartphone app to provide accurate, real-time alerts before the occurrence of an earthquake.

The MyShake app, which utilises your smartphone’s motion sensor to detect earthquakes, is a combined effort of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Deutsche Telekom AG.

It is based on an algorithm developed by UC Berkeley seismologists and programmers from the Silicon Valley Innovation Center, which is part of the Deutsche Telekom T-Labs, turned it into an app.

Myshake runs in the background consuming minimal power, allowing the device’s on-board accelerometer to record any kind of nearby jolts at any time of the day or night.

Moreover, this innovative app helps record the time and amplitude of a tremor, and subsequently sends the data along with the phone’s location to Berkeley’s seismological lab for analysis.

Although the app is in it’s budding stages, the researchers have pointed out that the system will improve as more people start using it.

“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 plugged in and connected to a WiFi network,” Deutsche Telekom said in an official statement.

One of the main purposes of the app is to create a global seismic network to eventually warn users ahead of impending jolts from nearby quakes.

The company also said, “For many earthquake prone developing countries such as Nepal and Peru, MyShake could potentially warn affected persons valuable seconds earlier, and ideally, save lives.

“These countries currently have either only a sparse ground-based seismic network or early warning system, or none at all – but do have millions of smartphone users,” the company said.

MyShake will be presented by the company at the Mobile World Conference (MWC) 2016 to be held in Barcelona from February 22-25.

The free Android app is currently available to the general public, and users can download it from the Google Playstore. Apple users have no reason to be disappointed as an iPhone app is also on the cards.

After the app gains a bit of traction and all the bugs are fixed, UC Berkeley seismologists plan to warn people regarding an approaching earthquake