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Earthquake-Sensing Mobile App 'MyShake' Detects Over 200 Earthquakes Large and Small (techcrunch.com)
Back in February, researchers at UC Berkeley released an app called MyShake that detects strong earthquakes seconds before the damaging seismic waves arrive. Several months have passed since its release and app has already detected over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries. TechCrunch reports: The app has received nearly 200,000 downloads, though only a fraction of those are active at any given time; it waits for the phone to sit idle so it can get good readings. Nevertheless, over the first six months the network of sensors has proven quite effective. "We found that MyShake could detect large earthquakes, but also small ones, which we never thought would be possible," one of the app's creators, Qingkai Kong, told New Scientist. A paper describing the early results was published in Geophysical Research Letters -- the abstract gives a general idea of the app's success: "On a typical day about 8000 phones provide acceleration waveform data to the MyShake archive. The on-phone app can detect and trigger on P waves and is capable of recording magnitude 2.5 and larger events. The largest number of waveforms from a single earthquake to date comes from the M5.2 Borrego Springs earthquake in Southern California, for which MyShake collected 103 useful three-component waveforms. The network continues to grow with new downloads from the Google Play store everyday and expands rapidly when public interest in earthquakes peaks such as during an earthquake sequence." You can download the app for Android here.
Shake?
If your friendly neighborhood government had forced a tracking device (with the ability to monitor most communications) upon each of us,
we'd have pitched a wall-eyed fit.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
She said the earth moved for her, but wouldn't let me check the app.
I'm guessing this app will be popular in New Zealand right now
If ever there were an indication that a developer is a soul-less Windows-using drone, it's got to be his choice to prefix everything with "My".
Yes, some are quite sensitive. I did some experiments with an iPhone 5S, wanting to detect respiration. Was surprised that it also clearly picked up heartbeat. It works best with the phone laying on your stomach while laying on your back. It takes some filtering to get a clear signal, but iOS (and I presume Android) has the necessary signal processing APIs to clean it up.
Please don't try this while asleep and unmonitored, and certainly not with a Samsung!
If you have a NTTDocomo smartphone you'll have this feature enabled by default. Whenever there's a big earthquake coming, the phone automatically send an alarm. They base their alarms on the government's earthquake warning system which is a large network all over Japan.
Each user would have the phone situated on different surfaces with different resonances, which I presume would lead to different readings and waveforms. Sounds like a neat app but I wonder how useful the data is for actual scientific use.
MyShake brings all the boys to the yard
MyShake is better than YourShake
Ah, baseless criticism of science work because someone wants to pretend they can outwit a scientist with ten seconds of minimal effort.
Does it detect earthquakes when the phone's vibrator goes off?
-- Cheers!