SBIR Phase I: Implementing a low-cost seismic network using mobile phones and MEMS accelerometers

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to create a dense and inexpensive seismic network that will monitor earthquake hazard and provide real-time notifications of impending tremors to residents in affected areas. This earthquake early warning system will also help operators of nuclear power plants and other utilities, transportation infrastructure and critical manufacturing facilities downgrade their operations in a timely manner ahead of a seismic event. An affordable and scalable seismic network could have as many as tens of thousands of sensors in metropolitan cities, enabling the creation of highly accurate shaking maps with resolution down to 100m (compared with resolutions of around 10km for current maps), providing valuable information for homeowners, city developers, and insurance companies to compute insurance risk and premiums. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project addresses the lack of effective early warning systems in the US and in many other earthquake prone countries. Traditional seismic networks are costly to construct and operate. This project proposes to create a scalable seismic network for a fraction of the cost of a traditional seismic network. The company plans to use inexpensive MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Sensor) accelerometers attached to internet-connected used/recycled smartphones to detect vibrations and transmit pre-processed data to a server. Fast magnitude estimation algorithms will be developed for both the client sensor devices (i.e. the smartphones) and server computing platform to reliably distinguish earthquakes from other vibration sources and to estimate the magnitude and time of arrival of tremors in affected areas. The objective is to generate a warning within two seconds of the origin of an earthquake, thereby providing sufficient time for appropriate actions to be taken in surrounding affected areas.