Smartphone Detection of Collapsed Buildings During Earthquakes

Abstract

The leading cause of death during earthquakes is the collapse of urban infrastructures and the subsequent delay of emergency responders in identifying and reaching the affected sites. To overcome this challenge, we designed and evaluated a crowdsensing system that detects collapsed buildings using end-user smartphones as distributed sensors. We present our evaluation of smartphones' accuracy in inferring a building collapse by detecting falls onto solid surfaces, and estimating the false positive rate. Further sensors can present more detailed information about each potential collapse event. We conduct simulations to identify strategies for dealing with false-positive data under scenarios of..