Turn your smartphone into quake detector with MyShake app

A team of researchers has shaken things up with a new app so that you can turn your smartphones into personal earthquake detectors.

The University of California scientists are coming out with a Japanese version of an Android app that crowdsources ground-shaking information from smartphones to detect quakes and eventually warn users of impending jolts from nearby quakes.

The app, called MyShake, will be publicly available on Sunday, May 22 (Tokyo time), through the Google Play Store, which can be accessed via the MyShake website.

It runs in the background and draws little power, so that a phone's onboard accelerometers can record local shaking any time of the day or night.

For now, the app only collects information from the accelerometers, analyzes it and, if it fits the vibrational profile of a quake, relays it and the phone's GPS coordinates to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in California for analysis.

Since it was first released in English on Feb. 12, 2016, more than 170,000 people have downloaded the app from around the world, and on any given day 11,000 phones provide data to the system. In these three months, the network has recorded earthquakes in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, New Zeland, Taiwan, Japan and across North America, including induced earthquakes in Oklahoma. The system has recorded earthquakes as small as magnitude 2.5 and as large as the April 16, 2016, magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Ecuador.

Once enough people are using the app and the bugs are worked out, UC Berkeley seismologists plan to use the data to warn people miles from ground zero that shaking is rumbling their way.

"We think MyShake can make earthquake early warning faster and more accurate in areas that have a traditional seismic network, such as Japan, and can provide life-saving early warning in countries that have no seismic network," said Richard Allen, the leader of the app project.

"In my opinion, this is cutting-edge research that will transform seismology," said Qingkai Kong, who developed the algorithm at the heart of the app. "The stations we have for traditional seismology are not that dense, especially in some regions around the world, but using smartphones with low-cost sensors will give us a really good, dense network in the future."

Spanish and Chinese versions of the app are planned for the future, as is MyShake for the iPhone.