New App Turns Android Smartphones Into Earthquake Detectors Indo-Asian News Service ,

File picture shows a seismograph readout.    

A new Android app is capable of detecting tremors and sending the data to scientists.
The developers of the MyShake app claim to be able to detect a magntitude five earthquake from 10 kilometres away or less.
The app collects quake data at a central site, where an algorithm confirms that an earthquake is indeed occurring.
"The location, origin time, and magnitude of the earthquake are then determined on the basis of multiple triggers from the network of phones. This information can be used to estimate the shaking intensity and the remaining time until damaging waves arrive at a target location," read an excerpt of the study, published in the Science Advances journal.
Worried about your phone's battery life when using the app? The team has sought to reassure users.
"The MyShake application currently uses about the same power that a smartphone uses when it is on but is not being used. For most users, a phone running MyShake does not need to be charged more than once every 24 hours."
Of course, the app requires plenty of users to be truly effective. So how accurate is it then?
Well, the team said that out of 1000 simulations (featuring 200 phones), the apps missed about three percent of events.
"We also conducted a second group of 1000 simulations without earthquakes, just false triggers. None of these generated a false event. This is because we require >60 percent of active phones within a 10-km radius region to trigger for an event declaration," the team explained.