- Developed by a team from University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the app called MyShake is available on Google Play Store. The app takes information from smartphones to detect earthquakes and warns users about them.
- The app runs in the background and draws little power, so that a phone’s onboard accelerometers can record local tremors any
time of the day or night.
- Currently, the app only collects information from the accelerometers, analyses 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.
- More than 170,000 people have downloaded the app from around the world, enabling over 11,000 phones to provide
data to the system.
Since February, the network has recorded earthquakes in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, 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 16 April 2016, magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Ecuador.
(With agency inputs.)
