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Proposed by: google.org
Contact (name, email, phone, skype): Steve Hakusa <shakusa@google.com>, Pablo Mayrgundter <pmy@google.com>
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: email
The epicenter for the Haitian Earthquake was 25km from Port-au-Prince and 13km deep, meaning 28km propagation distance; this equates to 5.6 seconds away from the less-damaging primary waves, and 9.3 seconds away from the very damaging secondary waves. Also, large earthquakes may take place over many tens of seconds, so the time to react is significant.
If detection and notification could be done before this time, people in the city could have had a chance to brace for impact, take cover or run outside. Also, notification that the shaking is an earthquake, instead of say a big truck going by, may prime a person to be ready to react.
"Ana is at home before the earthquake strikes. Her phone (or computer, or TV) issues a loud alert warning of an impending earthquake, along with a count-down in seconds; Ann grabs her child and takes cover under the kitchen table. Part of the roof falls in but the table protects them and they are able to crawl out of the rubble."
False positives may lead people to ignore later true positives. Thought should be given of how to clarify alerting behavior to users, before, during and after an alert is issued.
Solution should be likely to be near to people, e.g. phone, radio or TV.
Modern smart-phones typically have accelerometers and high-accuracy GPS and timers and are likely to be near their user, often also at night; however mobile phones are mobile! They also have low power resources. A phone client may need to operate only when otherwise idle, not moving and plugged in.
A phone is also a good target for user alerts, since it will likely be with them. Thought should be given to how alerts can be distributed to phone users, including to users who do not operate sensors.
Alerting every phone might not be the best solution at all. A cell phone is always on the move, so if there's an earthquake in California and Mary (who lives in New York) is visiting her parents in San Francisco, won't get the alert. Maybe it'd be a good idea to make use of the cell phones network to broadcast messages on each cell. This way the earthquake center will trigger the 'earthquake alert' which will broadcast through the mobile network alerting every cell phone on the range. Mary who lives in New York will receive the alert as her cell phone is now registered in one of San Francisco's cells.
QCN is a solution using a distributed p2p sensing network. The project is still developing and could use a mobile client.
BOINC, the platform on which QCN is built, has an Android client port:
http://boincoid.sourceforge.net/