A Smart Device Using Low-cost Sensors
to Detect Earthquakes
Jangsoo Lee1 , Jae-Seon Kim2 , Seonhwa Choi2 , and Young-Woo Kwon1
1
Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea
2
National Disaster Management Research Institute, Ulsan, South Korea
dellhartsmailbox@gmail.com, shchoi33@korea.kr, js9996@korea.kr, ywkwon@knu.ac.kr
Abstract—Due to the significant development of hardware
and software technologies in mobile and embedded computing,
small hand-held devices such as smartphones have been used to
detect earthquakes. In the past few years, there were efforts
to detect earthquakes using a low-cost acceleration sensors
inside a smartphone. However, it is not only costly to use a
smartphone for merely detecting earthquakes, but also a waste
of computing resources because smartphones comes with a
powerful CPU, plentiful memory, and other auxiliary sensors.
Also, a smartphone always needs to be connected to Internet.
In this paper, we introduce a stand-alone earthquake detection
device equipped with an acceleration sensor and Wi-Fi. First, we
systematically evaluated a set of acceleration sensors by assessing
their performance and accuracy to select the most suitable
acceleration sensor, and then developed an designated device
that can detect earthquakes and send alerts to nearby devices.
Furthermore, to distinguish earthquakes from daily motions, we
employed a Artificial Neural Network(ANN) technique with the
earthquake dataset obtained from the Pohang earthquake in
South Korea, 2017. Our result shows that a low-cost acceleration
sensor can be used to detect an earthquake, thereby enhancing
the public safety of communities vulnerable to earthquakes.
Index Terms—Earthquake, accelerometer, internet of things,
earthquake early warning, machine learning
I. I NTRODUCTION
In the last decade, mobile devices including smartphones
and Internet of things (IoT) have made a significant devel-
opment in both hardware and software. Such mobile devices
are often equipped with a variety of sensors such as an
accelerometer, a gyroscope, a GPS, a magnitometer, etc.,
and these sensors are widely used to get useful information
(e.g., location-aware services), to improve user experiences
(e.g., game), to keep track of their daily life (e.g., health
applications), etc. Furthermore, recently there were attempts
to use sensors inside smartphone to detect an earthquake.
In particular, MyShake can detect earthquakes by capturing
sensor data from smartphones [1].
Recently, there were two earthquakes: magnitude 5.6 earth-
quake in Gyeongju and magnitude 5.4 earthquake in Pohang,
South Korea, in 206 and 2017, respectively. As a result, there
were high demands to detecting earthquakes and responding
to them in a short time. One approach is to use smartphone-
based seismic networks, but it is costly to use a smartphone
for detecting earthquakes as well as asking volunteers to host
their smartphones as a seismic sensor. Furthermore, due to the
nature of smartphones that are heavily used in our daily life,
978-1-5386-7789-6/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
a majority of data captured by smartphones are useless when
detecting earthquakes.
In this paper, we developed a smart device which can be
attached to a wall or a ceiling. Because the device is only
equipped with necessary sensors including an accelerometer,
a Wi-Fi, a microprocessor, etc., its cost is very low compared
to a smartphone. To determine the hardware specification of
the earthquake detection device, we carefully evaluated four
different acceleration sensors to select an appropriate one. The
developed earthquake detection and response system operates
as a stand-alone detector while other approaches need Internet
connections to collaborate with a remote server or cloud for
further processing. Finally, to evaluate our system we tested
our earthquake detection algorithm using the dataset recorded
during the Pohang earthquake and then trained our machine
learning algorithm, thereby being able to detect earthquakes
occurs in South Korea. Because the model can be trained with
different earthquake datasets recorded at other locations, the
introduced system can be easily applied to different countries.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section II de-
scribes the technical backgrounds and compares our approach
with state-of-the-art technologies. Section III evaluates a set
of acceleration sensors and introduces the developed system.
Section IV concludes this paper.
II. BACKGROUND AND R ELATED W ORK
In this section, we introduce background technologies that
we used in this paper and relevant projects that influenced
on our work. There are several efforts to detect earthquakes
using smartphones or low-cost acceleration sensors. MyShake
is the most recent effort to detect earthquakes by utilizing
smartphone sensors. In MyShake, volunteers are asked to
install a mobile application that smartphone sensors can detect
earthquake motions. Then, the application keeps monitoring
daily motions and detects earthquakes by using an artificial
neural network. MyShake is a first world-wide earthquake
early warning system using smartphone sensors.
Prior to the MyShake project, NetQuakes [2] is a project
conducted by USGS to detect earthquakes using low-cost
MEMS sensors and installed a small device at small build-
ings world-wide, but mostly in California. In this project, to
select an appropriate low-cost MEMS sensor, they classified
acceleration sensors into three categories—class A, B, and C.
Class A sensors are used in traditional seismic stations while
Class C sensors are used in mobile devices. In NetQuakes, a
class B sensor was used to detect earthquakes and its cost was
about $500.
The Quake-Catcher [3] and Community Seismic Network
[4] are another similar projects to detect earthquakes using
low-cost MEMS acceleration sensors as seismic sensors. In
these projects, sensors were installed at residential buildings
across California, and around the world.
Similarly to our work, much efforts have been made to
assess low-cost MEMS acceleration sensors [5]. In our work,
we evaluated four different sensors using the recent earthquake
occurred in South Korea, and then developed a new hardware
and software system based on the experimental results.
cost. An acceleration sensor captures motions more precisely
as the noise level is lower and the sensitivity is higher.
According to the specification of each sensor and criteria,
ADXL355 is considered the best sensor, and the second one
is LIS3DHH. When detecting earthquakes using acceleration
sensors, because the most important factor is noise level, both
ADXL355 and LIS3DHH outperform the other two sensors.
In our work, another important consideration is cost. Because
we are targeting a low-cost device that anyone can install
without economic loads, we need to select an appropriate
acceleration sensor that meets both the accuracy and reliability
requirements.

III. A PPROACH TABLE I

T HE SELECTED ACCELERATION SENSORS .
In this section, we introduce a smart device using a low-cost
ADXL355 LIS3DHH MPU9250 MMA8452
acceleration sensor and an earthquake detection algorithm that √
Noise (µg/ Hz) 25 45 300 126
can distinguish earthquakes from captured motions. Then, we Sensitivity 0.0039 0.076 0.061 9.76
describe how we selected an appropriate acceleration sensor. (mg/digit)
Finally, we provide a detail the hardware and software systems Data output (bit) 20 16 16 12
Scale (g) 2.048 2.5 2 2
of our earthquake detection and response system. Max. output (Hz) 1,000 1,100 4,000 800
1) Approach Overview: Figure 1 shows the overview of
our earthquake detection and response system, which basically
operates as a stand-alone device unlike other earthquake
detection systems such as MyShake and NetQuakes. 2) Experimental Setup: To assess the accuracy of each
acceleration sensor, we used the shake table located Pusan
National University (PNU) to generate high fidelity earthquake
motion for our testing. These shake table tests serves the
purpose of both testing the low-cost sensors performance
under large shaking and also collecting data for training the
algorithm. The Shake Table at PNU is capable of reproducing
earthquake motion in 3 dimensions with very high fidelity
in both frequency and amplitude. This allowed the accuracy
of the low-cost acceleration sensors to be measured and
tested under realistic earthquake loads and against a reference
acceleration sensor. As depicted in Figure 2, the acceleration
sensors were prepared for the shake tests at PNU.
propagate
Detecting Earthquake

Fig. 1. The system overview.

A. An Assessment of Acceleration Sensors

In this section, We discuss the criteria for selection of
acceleration sensors and experimental setup for detecting
earthquakes.
1) Acceleration Sensors: Table III-A1 summarizes the sen-
sors that we tested and assessment criteria that were used to
compare the sensors. We assessed four acceleration sensors
to see how accurate data can be collected, and then we
selected an appropriate sensor with the respect to accuracy and Fig. 2. The shake table experiment.
 We tested our sensors with two realistic earthquakes—
2017 Pohang1 and 1940 El Centro 2 — and then analyzed the
experimental results by comparing the original input data (i.e.,
reference) and the recorded data by each device. Even though
we tested the sensors with two earthquakes, in this paper, we
only report the experimental results obtained from the 2017
Pohang earthquake due to the page limitation.
3) Experimental Results: In order to use low-cost acceler-
ation sensors for detecting earthquakes, they must be able to
measure changes in the acceleration caused by various degrees
of earthquakes ranging from 0.02g to 0.8g. Therefore, we need
to check whether acceleration sensors can respond to such
weak and strong motions. To that end, we used the scaled
1
data of the 2017 Pohang earthquake from 20 , 18 , 14 , 21 , 1, to
2 (i.e., 0.02g to 0.8g). Figure 3 shows the original data of the
2017 Pohang earthquake.
Fig. 3. Pohang earthquake—5% to 200%; X, Y, Z axis
To see how the measured and actual values look similar, we
played back the actual Pohang earthquake and then recorded
motion with a 25 Hz sampling rate. Figure 4 shows accel-
eration values of the recorded data by each sensor and the
original input data. As can be seen in the chart, ADXL355
and LIS3DHH show a comparable shape to the input data.
However, MMA8452 and MPU9250 are more vulnerable to
noise at weak motions.
4) Evaluation of Earthquake Detection: In this section,
we evaluate how accurately low-cost acceleration sensors
can detect earthquakes. To detect earthquakes from motions
generated by the shake table, we employed the artificial neural
network.
1 The 2017 Pohang earthquake measuring magnitude 5.4, South Korea on
November 15 2017.
2 The 1940 El Centro earthquake measuring magnitude 6.9, in the Imperial
Valley near Southern California, USA on May 18 1940.
Fig. 4. Pohang earthquake with 100% scale and recorded data on X-axis;
from top to left, ADXL355, LIS3DHH, MMA8452, MPU9250, respectively
Figure 5 shows the experimental result detecting earth-
quakes based on the normalized value for the x, y, and z
components. When applying the detection algorithm to the
reference data, two earthquake-like motions were detected in
3 seconds, and earthquake-like motions were detected three
times when using low-cost acceleration sensors. To further
evaluate the accuracy of the earthquake detection algorithm,
we used the 50% and 20% scaled data of the 2017 Pohang
earthquake. As can bee seen in Figure 6, while the algorithm
can detect an earthquake from the 50% scaled data, it could
not detect any earthquake from the 25% scaled data.
B. Development of the Earthquake Detection System
In this section, we detail the hardware and software system
to detect earthquakes. Figure 7 shows the developed hardware
using a low-cost acceleration sensor, 32bit processor (ARM
Cortex-M3), Wi-Fi, buzzer, LED light, etc.
1) Hardware: The earthquake detection algorithm requires
a relatively large amount of computation and memory in
the process of extracting features from a seismic wave and
computing a neural network. These computational capabilities
and memory are not a big consideration in the smartphone
environment, but they should be carefully considered for re-
source constrained devices such as Internet of Things devices.
In this paper, we use ARM Cortex M3 which used in Arduino
Due as a main MCU due to the following reasons: relatively
high computational performance to provide simultaneous ma-
chine learning calculations, ample memory for the earthquake
detection algorithm, and the ease of prototyping the proof of
concept. Furthermore, we selected LIS3DHH because of its
accuracy compared to MPU9250 and MMA8452 and low cost
(about $10/chip) compared to ADXL355 (about $50). Figure 7
shows the developed hardware using the selected acceleration
sensor (LIS3DHH), MCU (ARM Cortex M3), and Wi-Fi. In
 Fig. 5. Earthquake detection results, 2017 Pohang earthquake (100% scale); left: original data, middle: ADXL355, right: LIS3DHH
Fig. 6. Earthquake detection results, Pohang (50% scale), left: LIS3DHH,
right: MMA8452.
addition, the board also has a buzzer and LED to warn around
when an earthquake strikes.
2) Software: The developed system provides three services.
In the event of an earthquake, users connected to the system
will be alerted by the attached buzzer and LED. The system
captures any acceleration changes, and runs the earthquake
detection algorithm when observing shaking above a certain
level (e.g., 0.02g). To reduce false alarms, the system executes
the earthquake detection algorithm with two seconds of a
time window for seven seconds, and then if the result of
the earthquake detection algorithm exceeds a certain threshold
during the given time period (i.e., seven seconds in the current
implementation), the current movement will be determined as
an earthquake.
Because the earthquake detection algorithm only classifies a
current motions into an earthquake motion or not-earthquake
motion, we need to calculate the magnitude of the detected
earthquake. However, it is difficult to calculate the magnitude
using only one acceleration sensor. Instead, we calculate the
intensity of the current motion by measuring PGA values, and
then the intensity level is sent out to nearby devices such
as smartphones or smart watches. The current system uses
the Wi-Fi technology to connect nearby, but we will use the
Bluetooth Low Energy technology in the next version.
IV. F UTURE W ORK AND C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we introduced a smart device that can detect
earthquakes using low-cost MEMS sensors. As the future
research direction, we will train our artificial neural network
Fig. 7. The developed earthquake detection system.
model with more Korea earthquakes and human activity data.
We are also looking into further improvements to extend
the earthquake detection system by employing home network
devices, so that in case of emergent situations, the developed
system can respond to them proactively, thereby enhancing the
public safety of communities vulnerable to earthquakes
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by National Disaster Management
Research Institute (2018-08-02-02).
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