Researchers Test Smartphones for Earthquake Warning

UH Faculty Among Researchers Exploring Use of Smartphones in Quake Zones


The study, published April 10 in the inaugural volume of the AAAS journal Science Advances, found that the sensors in smartphones and similar devices could be used to build earthquake warning systems.  Despite being less accurate than scientific-grade equipment, the GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers in a smartphone can detect the permanent ground movement caused by fault motion in a large earthquake.

University of Houston researchers Craig Glennie and Darren Hauser are among those participating in the study.

Using crowd-sourced observations from participating users’ smartphones, earthquakes could be detected and analyzed, and customized earthquake warnings could be transmitted back to users.

“The speed of an electronic warning travels faster than the earthquake shaking does,” said Glennie, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UH.

Sarah Minson, U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist and lead author of the study, said the crowd-sourced alerting “means that the community will benefit by data generated by the community.” Minson was a post-doctoral researcher at Caltech while working on this study.

While much of the world’s population is susceptible to damaging earthquakes, earthquake early warning (EEW) systems are currently operating in only a few regions around the globe, including Japan and Mexico.


Researchers tested the feasibility of crowd-sourced EEW with a simulation of a hypothetical magnitude 7 earthquake, and with real data from the 2011 magnitude 9 Tohoku-oki, Japan earthquake. The results show that crowd-sourced EEW could be achieved with only a tiny percentage of people in a given area contributing information from their smartphones. For example, if phones from fewer than 5,000 people in a large metropolitan area responded, the earthquake could be detected and analyzed fast enough to issue a warning to areas farther away before the onset of strong shaking.


Comprehensive EEW requires a dense network of scientific instruments.  Scientific-grade EEW, such as the USGS’s ShakeAlert system currently being implemented on the west coast of the United States, will be able to help minimize the impact of earthquakes over a wide range of magnitudes.  However, crowd-sourced EEW has significant potential in parts of the world where consumer electronics are increasingly common but there aren’t sufficient resources to build and maintain scientific networks.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has already agreed to fund a pilot project, in collaboration with the Chilean Centro Sismologico Nacional, to test a pilot hybrid earthquake warning system comprising stand-alone smartphone sensors and scientific-grade sensors along the Chilean coast.




