Earthquake Early Warning and Beyond: Systems Challenges in Smartphone-based Seismic Network

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and deployment of the MyShake smartphone-based seismic network for earthquake early warning, highlighting challenges like sensing heterogeneity and system dynamics, and exploring future research directions.

Contribution

It provides insights into building a large-scale, smartphone-based seismic network and addresses key challenges for real-world earthquake early warning systems.

Findings

Identification of sensing heterogeneity challenges

Analysis of user and system dynamics impacts

Initial exploration of solutions for low-latency EEW

Abstract

Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems can effectively reduce fatalities, injuries, and damages caused by earthquakes. Current EEW systems are mostly based on traditional seismic and geodetic networks, and exist only in a few countries due to the high cost of installing and maintaining such systems. The MyShake system takes a different approach and turns people's smartphones into portable seismic sensors to detect earthquake-like motions. However, to issue EEW messages with high accuracy and low latency in the real world, we need to address a number of challenges related to mobile computing. In this paper, we first summarize our experience building and deploying the MyShake system, then focus on two key challenges for smartphone-based EEW (sensing heterogeneity and user/system dynamics) and some preliminary exploration. We also discuss other challenges and new research directions associated with smartphone-based seismic network.