Breaking News
recent

MyShake- An app that makes your smartphone an earthquake detector


Smartphones one day will probably take every gadget's job away from them. We all know the traditional method of seeing the time was with a watch and listening to music was with a radio.
All this is now done easily done with a smartphone.

And now an app called MyShake will detect earthquakes and send you a warning before an earthquake. 

It uses the installed hardware on your smartphone like the gyroscope which enables the app to detect earthquakes.

The application was developed by a group of scientists from UC Berkeley, and it is meant to help seismologists do their job. But the idea is a little different, as this project aims to take advantage of the fact that most of us use smartphones.


You may ask, how can a smartphone even detect an earthquake?

As we already mentioned about the gyroscope above, which enables the smartphone to sense movement.

Oh well, but we all keep walking, jogging and running with our phone's. So how will the app know if it's any normal movement or there's an earthquake actually?

Just one phone alone can not do anything, but the motive is to get as many users on the app and then the data can start making sense. For instance if 250 people around a specific vicinity register very similar activity at the same time, then you can predict that it is not them moving, but everything around them is. It seems that the set limit is 60%.
This means if more than that amount of users show seismic activity, an alert will go off. 


Apparently, phones can effectively record earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater, which are the ones that actualy matter.
The project is new and doesn't have many users as of now, but you could help them, and yourself, by downloading the app which is available on the Google Play Store.

We hope that this app is advertised to more and more people, if not everywhere, at least in the earthquake prone areas.

Want to help? You should! Go ahead and download the app. I've already signed up, have you?
Unknown

Unknown

No comments:

Post a Comment

Powered by Blogger.