A MacBook based earthquake early warning system

Abstract

We demonstrate an early stage of our prototypical development of an earthquake early warning system based on Apple's MacBook computers. This system, called MacSeisApp, utilizes the Sudden Motion Sensors in MacBooks to detect seismic activities. It is inspired by an existing application called SeisMac, which turns a MacBook computer into a seismograph. MacSeisApp expands on SeisMac by using Apple's Push Notifications (APN) via a dedicated server for earthquake notification. Written in both the C and Objective-C under XCode Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), MacSeisApp utilizes an open-source library to detect the vibrations via the Sudden Motion Sensor and to translate it into points to be plotted as a seismograph.