MyShake: A smartphone seismic network for earthquake early warning and beyond

Large magnitude earthquakes in urban environments continue to kill and injure tens to hundreds of thousands of people, inflicting lasting societal and economic disasters. The handful of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems operating around the world use traditional seismic and geodetic networks that exist only in a few nations. Smartphones are much more prevalent than traditional networks and contain accelerometers that can also be used to detect earthquakes.

This publication reports on the development of a new seismic system, MyShake, that harnesses personal/private smartphone sensors to collect data and analyze earthquakes. The authors show that smartphones can record magnitude 5 earthquakes at distances of 10 km or less and develop an on-phone detection capability to separate earthquakes from other everyday shakes. This information can then be used to:

• Issue an alert of forthcoming ground shaking.
• Enhance EEW in regions with traditional networks and could provide the only EEW capability in regions without
• Deliver rapid microseism maps, study impacts on buildings, and possibly image shallow earth structure and earthquake rupture kinematics.

Science Advances, February 2016, Volume 2, Number 2. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical License 4.0.