QuakeApp: A Comprehensive Earthquake Detection and Monitoring System

Traditional earthquake monitoring networks are limited by their sparse coverage and high deployment costs, leaving many at-risk areas without timely alerts. This work addresses whether smartphone accelerometers can be reliably used for real-time earthquake detection and how crowdsourced data can enhance the spatial density of seismic networks. QuakeApp was developed as a distributed sensing system, combining a mobile app for event detection, a scalable backend for data aggregation, and a dashboard for visualization. Previous research in similar crowdsourced systems has reported detection accuracies exceeding 90% under laboratory conditions, but QuakeApp’s results remain to be validated. The main contributions of this work are: (1) a distributed earthquake detection algorithm for smartphones, (2) a backend architecture for real-time crowdsourced aggregation, and (3) a quantitative assessment of citizen-based seismic sensing.