Earthquake relief – Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Part I

Cell phones accelerators can be used to measure seismic activity through specific apps. Credit: PhysOrg

The quake was much, much stronger than the ones we have been used to live with. For as long as I remember trembles were part of life in this part of the world and that of course prompted the construction of buildings that can stand strong quakes and indeed it worked. Yet, when Mother Nature decides to punch hard you can still preserve the integrity of structures but the “infrastructure” are going to be hit heavily. When the Earth crust is rising and fracturing pipes and cables are bound to rupture, fixtures pop out and shingles fall from the roof. Besides, not all buildings have been built in recent years, we still have quite a few that go back tens and even hundreds of years and their reconditioning to stand quakes can only go that far. There is also the additional problem of furniture inside buildings, they are supposed to be fixed to walls but you cannot fix tables and chairs and the stuff you place in chests and closets. They are bound to wave, roll and fall causing damage and hurting people.

Technology surely helps, and technology is not a problem. The problem is its cost, and more than that the cost of its deployment. It is, as in most cases, a trade-off you have to accept. But, then, you can prepare yourself for the worst.

In the past, the first information that a quake struck came from outside of the area hit by the quake, and the worse the quake the more difficult it was to understand what really happened. It could take days to get a clear idea of the impact of the quake and even weeks to map the damages. You might see destruction in an area and within that very area a few scattered unscathed buildings. And sometimes an old building, with no quake resistance would stand beside one that was supposedly more solid and within a building that stood apparently unscathed you may discover hurt people whilst in others apparently crumbled several people could be safe although difficult to reach.

Now it is different. In a few seconds the quake monitoring centre is flooded by data that can be analysed and turned into a quite precise situational map, showing the impact and pointing to where relief is most needed and urgent.

A seismic map based on cell phones detection. Credit: Berkeley, University of California

Smartphones are playing a crucial role, acting as an autonomous system that interacts with several other autonomous systems in a symbiotic manner. Each smartphone has a sensor detecting acceleration, that is effectively a quake detector. Clearly, it is way less accurate than the ones used in labs, able to detect a quake occurring thousand miles away. But smartphones, collectively as a system, compensate their low accuracy by being “exactly” there, where the quake impact is felt and by their huge number. The data provided create a map made by thousands of sensing points, hundreds of thousands in a city, and software can work on these data to assess the impact in each location with fine granularity. Besides, the smartphones are related to people, and are connected to ambient and objects (IoT) hence they provide a context. It is now a few years that controlling home appliances through a smartphone has become normal. This involves local communications and through signal processing it is easy to build a map localising with pretty good precision each appliance and the relative position of the smartphone. This positioning does not require the GPS signal, which is difficult to get indoor. By looking at different time stamp it is straightforward to know if the phone (i.e. a person holding it) is moving or not and the types of movement can be tell tale of a critical situation.

Of course, getting these data requires the owner of the phone to release them (provide a permission) and some people are not releasing them for privacy concerns. There have been talks on regulating and forcing the release of data (ensuring their protection) exactly to cover emergency situations like this but no action has been taken so far. The privacy versus safety debate is still on. Of course, the outcome of events like this push towards the release of data, mostly by creating awareness in the population rather than through enforcement.

We had smartphones for quite a while but they were not “autonomous”, they depended on the availability of the network. They were “terminals”, smart but unable to live without a network. Starting with 5G a new paradigm took place: smartphones, as well as vehicles and a number of IoTs – a vehicle, by the way, is an IoT-, can create a network (a mesh

Cell phones can establish communications with one another creating local networks that can live in absence of the “big” network. This will be particularly so with the advent of 5G. Image credit: Shutterstock

network) by talking to each other and can serve as communication nodes. In case of network failure the smart phones, autonomously, connect with one another and eventually to the network using a smartphone that is within reach of a functioning network and that plays the role of access point to the all meshed network.

Smartphones haven’t been designed to operate in a disaster area, but they do, because they have been designed to be autonomous systems. Software, applications, have been designed to make sense of data, and these applications are the ones that can turn the data generated by the embedded accelerator into information on the quake.

Besides, each smartphone can bring information on its local context, on the IoT that are connected with it, and on their relative position so that by looking at before, during and after it is possible to create a dynamic map of what happened.

The associated localisation of this information allows the monitoring centre to evaluate the impact (the acceleration strength and type matched with the location/type of construction can tell a lot about the effect). This information is also created within the area, so even if no connection to the centre is possible people affected by the earthquake are aware of the situation and can provide relief in a much more informed way.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.