Myshake – A New Smartphone App That Can Detect Earthquakes
Scientists have developed an app that crowdsources ground-shaking information from smartphones to detect earthquakes and eventually warns users of impending jolts from nearby quakes.
The app called MyShake, developed by researchers at University of California, Berkeley, runs in the background and draws little power, so that a phones onboard accelerometers can record local shaking any time of the day or night.
For now, the app only collects information from the accelerometers, analyses it and, if it fits the vibrational profile of a quake, relays it and the phones Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in California for analysis.
Since it was first released in English in February this year, more than 170,000 people have downloaded the app f...