Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

inferno006 t1_itw3zvc wrote

Reply to comment by Doomgloomya in Android phones offered early US quake warning, beating iPhones to the punch | Google's earthquake detection network turns Android phones into seismometers, and it paid off yesterday. by chrisdh79

I work in emergency services. Any advanced warning is better than none or little advanced warning.

But my first thought upon reading this headline with my years of emergency services is: I wonder how this is being used to investigate bombings and pinpointing epicenters of incidents like that?

83

Doomgloomya t1_itw7b33 wrote

What i'm assuming is that each device is already a min computer in of itself and how we build supercomputers is linking a bunch of computers together in a network to increase computing power. Now each smartwatch is constantly keeping track of everything we do from elevation we walk, steps, and heart rate. This means these are very sensitive devices able to differentiate different movements.

This is just a wild assumption based off what we know smart watches can do but because they are casting such a wide net the watches are able to sense differences in the environment and if several are sensing the same movement then it'll set off the alert system.

The simplest answer would just be google just has its own private seismometer thats is just better lmao.

13

kreiger-69 t1_ityx7n6 wrote

>being used to investigate bombings and pinpointing epicenters of incidents like that?

Don't they have microphones in the USA at traffic lights or something where they can poinpoint where a gunshot came from so they can send police there?

6

inferno006 t1_itz35gx wrote

The technology exists, but it is not widespread. Some places have it.

7

xXSpaceturdXx t1_ityz4oy wrote

Last I heard in my city they were only using them in certain areas. But yes they do have that tech. They may have expanded it here because they really cracked down on people shooting straight up into the sky. They made a new law for it and everything. It doesn’t stop it though. Guy at my work had a 40 Cal round come through the roof onto the floor in front of his desk. He didn’t want to sit in there for a week. Another friend of mine had one go through his roof and out the window on his truck. But that was in a different city.

2

nuclear_splines t1_iu148zu wrote

SpotShotter? Technically yes, but it works terribly. Even the Wikipedia articles second sentence reads “researchers have noted concerns about effectiveness, reliability, privacy, and equity [of ShotSpotter]”

2

DeepSpaceQueef t1_itzscwe wrote

Something I’ve wanted to see added to phones for a while now is shooting detection. It’s a bit of a tricky sell, because even if sound data is analyzed locally on a device, people would probably be sussed on their microphones being active while their phones are in their pockets, but it could provide early warning and shooter location data for nearby users and law enforcement. Combined with the fall sensors and heart rate monitors in a lot of smart watches, this could also provide casualty data like location and triage priority to first responders.

I was actually exploring making this into an app a year or two ago, but that requires users to install it and trust an app developer not to collect microphone data. It would only be as effective as adoption. Having the feature offered natively in the device ui like the earthquake and fall detection systems would be ideal.

We’ve come a long way with phone policies since I was in school, most students have their phones powered on through the entire school day and most schools have their students phone numbers on file. To make the data available to the school would only require students add the school ID to their device. Another option, which could work for schools and venues, is to allow the venue or school to add devices by number; the data would only be available when devices ping a possible gunshot and are in the boundaries of the venue or school location. It would also not be nearly as invasive as other features people used for contact tracing during the pandemic, as it would not allow the school or venue or authorities access to meta data upon request, it would require the device to either ping the data when it thinks it hears a gunshot or when an active shooter has been identified at the location.

1