Google lets its users turn Android smartphones into earthquake detectors.
Google had launched an earthquake alert system in California and said that it’s working on turning Android-powered smartphones into “tremor detectors”.
The new “ShakeAlert” system – which was created in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey and launched on Tuesday (California time) – used signals from hundreds of seismometers across the state in order to trigger warnings sent to users’ Android phones.
Marc Stogaitis, a principal software engineer at Google, said in a blog post that they saw an opportunity to use Android in order to provide people with “timely” and “helpful” earthquake information when they searched for it, as well as “a few seconds warning” in order for Android users to get themselves and their loved ones to safety if needed.
Stogaitis also said that smartphones were equipped with tiny accelerometers that could sense movement and could catch shaking that was caused by earthquakes, which means, their Android smartphones could be a “mini seismometer” joining a lot of other Android smartphones out there in order to form the “world’s largest earthquake detection network”.
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According to Google, Android smartphones that could detect what might be an “earthquake activity” could automatically send a signal to a data center wherein computers quickly interpreted the motion and location data in aggregate to identify whether an earthquake was happening.
Moreover, Stogaitis said that they’re starting with earthquake alerts in California just because the state had an “extensive seismometer network” in the said area.
While this feature officially launched in California, the alerts were expected to spread to other locations as soon as the smartphone-based detection network was established.
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