Earthquake Early Warning Services Based on Very Low-Cost Internet of Things Devices

The performance of an Earthquake Early Warning system is often tied to the density of its stations. The use of Internet of Things and Cloud technologies could further enhance the capabilities of these systems, providing tools to analyze, store and process data, and also to efficiently monitor devices. Moreover, the technological developments in Micro-electromechanical systems have allowed the creation of low-cost and small size seismic monitoring devices that can be used to create denser seismic networks. In this work we propose and evaluate the performance of an IoT-based Early Warning device based on MEMS technology. The results of the performance evaluation show that the device is able to detect events of magnitude greater than 4.1 and located less than 30km away. Furthermore, the integration of the device into a Cloud IoT Architecture gives the proposed solution event detection, device monitoring and alarm dissemination capabilities.