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February 6.7 earthquake occurred in southern Taiwan on the eve of the Spring Festival, causing the building to collapse, killing 116 people and injuring 550 people. In order to predict the occurrence of natural disasters in advance and take timely response measures, scientific and technological workers around the world are constantly exploring.
Last year, 3sNews reported that American scientists found that the use of GPS and satellite data in combination can make judgments on earthquake areas in advance. Since then, NASA has also announced the use of GPS crowdsourcing, coupled with the built-in GPS information in smartphones around the world, to monitor ground motion at the beginning of a large earthquake, thereby issuing an alarm.
Recently, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley released a mobile application software called MyShake, which can use the built-in accelerometer of smartphones to sense earthquakes to build a crowdsourcing earthquake network that can collect data and alert users.
Is this app really reliable? Its working principle is as follows:
1. After the software is run, various vibrations are sensed through the accelerometer in the mobile phone.
2. The App sends the message to the server to analyze whether it is an earthquake
3. If the server receives vibration messages from more than 4 mobile phones within a radius of 10 kilometers at the same time, it is determined that an earthquake occurred in the area
4. Push alert message to all users
0 Researchers said that since the sensor accuracy of the mobile phone is not as accurate as the seismometer, it can only feel earthquakes above magnitude 5, and the maximum range is no more than 10 kilometers. In addition, within a 110 square kilometers area, at least 300 MyShake-installed mobile phones can reasonably estimate the location, intensity and occurrence time of the earthquake. Of course, "the higher the network density, the faster the earthquake detection."
Someone can't help but ask: Can an earthquake be determined by 4 mobile phones? The researchers say this is: The core of MyShake is a specific algorithm, which can analyze the data of three acceleration sensors in the mobile phone and distinguish the difference between earthquakes and other common vibrations (such as mobile phone user activity or mobile phone drop). Simulation tests show that the success rate of this algorithm to distinguish earthquakes from non-seismic vibrations is as high as 93%.
simulated earthquake test
data shows that as of 2015, there were 3.4 billion smartphones worldwide. Researchers hope to use these phones to build a global earthquake network. "While MyShake cannot replace the traditional earthquake network, it can deliver earthquake messages from a certain place to surrounding users faster and more accurately than earthquake waves, saving dozens of seconds of valuable time," said Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Laboratory.
Allen also believes that if the density of the monitoring network composed of the mobile phone is high enough, detection, analysis and early warning can be achieved within 1 second. His long-term goal is to integrate earthquake monitoring functions into the smartphone operating system, so that every mobile phone user can become an integral part of the monitoring network.
researchers said that some basic requirements were also considered while writing mobile application software. For example, the privacy information of mobile phone users cannot be exposed, it will not occupy too much hardware resources on the phone, nor will it consume too much battery power.
Currently, users who use Android smartphones can download this application for free on the Google Play Store, and will also launch iOS version in the future. Earlier this month, MyShake received $1 million in funding from a foundation.
