http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/2015/08/07/new-smartphone-app-will-warn-of-upcoming-earthquakes/#32203101=0/

Tech Chronicles
News and views from the digital frontier.

New smartphone app will warn of upcoming earthquakes

Posted on August 7, 2015 | By seattlepi.com staff

A Palo Alto company is working on a smartphone app and sensor that will give people up to a minute of warning before an earthquake rumbles through their home.

Palo Alto company Zizmos is creating an early warning system for earthquakes. This is what alert modes looks like on iOS and Android. (Battalgazi Yindirim)
Palo Alto company Zizmos is creating an early warning system for earthquakes. This is what alert modes looks like on iOS and Android. (Battalgazi Yildirim/Zizmos)
The Zizmos warning system relies on mobile technology and a sensor with a MEMS accelerometer, which detects vibrations. After it’s installed in a home or building, the sensor connects to that building’s Wi-Fi and starts recording the ground shaking. It sends this data to the Zizmos cloud server, which uses an earthquake detection algorithm to determine if the shaking was a quake — or a car accident outside. If it is an earthquake, it determines the location and origin time.

That process takes a second or two. Push notifications are sent to Zizmos users’ smartphones immediately after an earthquake is detected. That could provide a few seconds to a minute of warning.

While that’s not enough time to start shopping for an earthquake preparedness kit, it could give users enough time to protect a child, slow down a train or stop a surgery, according to Zizmos founder and CEO Battalgazi Yildirim.

“Twenty seconds is not too much time,” he said. “But it is enough time to do many good things.”

From 2012 to 2014, Yildirim worked on creating a low-cost seismic network as a postdoc at the Quake Catcher Network (QCN) at Stanford University. In his second year there, Yildirim got support from his advisor Jesse Lawrence to start a company aimed at making an earthquake warning system using smartphones. The National Science Foundation provided an initial round of funding in January 2015.

The app, which is still unnamed, will be released by August 21, according to Yildirim. It will be free to download for iOS and Android. For more information on Zizmos, or to review where sensors are located, click here.

There are several apps already available for earthquake preparation and tracking. Click through the slides below to review them.

Good idea...Java/Android developer here...if you need help for free for the app just drop ae line...been thinking about ae earthquake prediction app for ages...

I tried this but got lost.
Satelite with positive ion detector that earthcrust earthquake gives off...
Satelite bounds back to earth server to decode algorthim.
Server relays to app.

This is ae dream lol

Rumor has it that the app will cause one's cell phone to vibrate whenever there is an earthquake.