A Low-cost Epicenter Estimation Scheme for Earthquake Early Warning Systems: A Preliminary Study

In this paper, a new approach to estimate the epicenter of an earthquake and calculate the Peak Ground Motion (PGA) at the epicenter, using fixed-location smartphone sensors has been proposed. The proposed scheme is a first step in designing a low-cost Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system. In the proposed method, multiple potential earthquake epicenters are estimated based on the earthquake signals recorded by limited number of fixed-location smartphones. Then, the actual epicenter is estimated and its PGA is calculated. These results can be used to determine possible disaster areas for early warning initiation. Evaluation results on actual earthquake data has resulted in an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 88% in estimating the PGA. The estimated epicenter position is 1.28 and 12.07 kilometers away from the actual ones in the Damavand and Mallard simulated datasets, respectively. Simulations demonstrate the feasibility of using smartphone sensors for real-time earthquake detection, offering an accessible alternative for regions with limited resources, at the cost of slightly reduced precision compared to existing systems that benefit from high precision accelerometers.