This junior high school consumer seismometer delivers a low-cost earthquake early warning

Photo: Vivienne is with an earthquake early warning device in her makeshift welding room diverted from the bathroom. Show more

Credit: Vivian He

A Southern California high school student built a low-cost seismograph that provides early earthquake warnings for homes and businesses. Costing less than $ 100 to manufacture today, a seismometer could someday be a regular home safety device that looks like a smart smoke detector, says its inventor Vivian He.

About the size of a Rubik’s cube and coated in clear acrylic, the seismometer is sleek in appearance and is consumer ready. The device’s geophone detects incoming ground motion, while onboard hardware and software translates the electrical signals of the geophone into a digital waveform. The device has detected all earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 around Los Angeles since September 2020.

When earthquakes are stronger than the alert threshold set by the user, the device can trigger an on-board alarm for on-site warning, and send a text message to local subscribers of the regional warning service, and it can be controlled from a smartphone.

She presented her on-device research at the 2021 SSA Annual Meeting and won the SSA Student Travel Scholarship, the only high school student among all recipients of this award, to attend the conference for free. She is a student at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School at Rolling Hills Estates. He thanks the research class teacher, Melissa Klose, for her guidance on scientific research methods and her support in pursuing research opportunities.

He has researched, designed, built and tested the entire device during his summer and fall homes spent under COVID-19 restrictions. Her home lab occupies a corner in a bedroom with “bedside drawers filled with little wires and extra geo-components and components.” She said.

There was also a bathroom that I borrowed as the bright light was suitable for welding. For acrylic laser cutting, her father helped her pull a table from the garage into the yard as a precaution.

“I did – don’t tell my mom – but I got on fire once,” she admits.

The seismometer fills a gap in current earthquake early warning systems, he said, by providing a consumer-friendly, low-cost but purpose-built alternative to more expensive and scientifically-grade systems such as the ShakeAlert system on the West Coast. Its device provides a means for people in earthquake areas to receive a warning of a few to tens of seconds to take action and automatically shut down facilities and machines to work.

He created a non-profit organization, Melior Earth, to help it deliver the device to those who need an inexpensive earthquake early warning system. “I have hopes that I will be able to provide this for low-income families and neighborhoods with less earthquake-resistant infrastructure,” she said.

Calm under quarantine

He got the idea of ​​a seismometer after reading a research paper on the unusual seismic “calm” that landed above the ground when the COVID-19 lockdowns brought a lot of human activity to a halt. “I was wondering if I could measure that from my home, and then it quickly evolved into,” she recalls, “wondering if I could measure this at home and apply it to earthquake early warning?”

I began reading about earthquake early warning and building a giant three-episode cover of featured papers, including several SSA journals. One of her favorite researchers in the field was Richard M. Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Laboratory.

“I really enjoyed the way he explained the earthquake early warning systems and the limitations of the current systems,” he said.

Research grants are confidence in its ability to build a low-cost earthquake early warning device, with a consumer-based approach versus the traditional public-station-based approach. Next, it was time to learn about the components, programming, and design. She did not have much experience getting into the project, however, since much of the necessary skills and knowledge was outside the curriculum.

“I went to the MIT hackathon that day, and what they said is that the secret of hackers is that they are only looking for everything, right?” She said. “And it’s a bit like what I did for this project, like, oh, I don’t know how this works, just search Google for it!”

As will be discussed in her SSA presentation, the device has evolved over time as her skills improve and design problems are solved along the way. Besides the alert and notification functions, the final design contains a data card that can hold up to four years of standard seismic waveform files that can also be used in seismology studies.

“You guys are you hearing that?”

It connected its first seismometer one night after midnight last September. “And then I went to sleep, and then the next day I woke up and there was an earthquake in Los Angeles and I was like, Oh, it’s a pot!”

She compared the seismic signal captured by her device to the signal produced by the US Geological Survey station near her home, and “the waveform looked the same.”

One of the early successes in the test period came when, “My family was all in the living room and we were all talking and the device started beeping and I said, ‘Hey, did you hear that? And they were like, ‘Is it an earthquake?’ Then the pendant lights started vibrating. ‘

The seismometer has since succeeded in detecting several recent earthquakes in Southern California, and has participated in science exhibitions in its education district and Los Angeles County. There, she won the final prize at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), which led her to compete internationally afterwards. In addition, she has won the Association of Geoscientists Award, Cheryl Saban Self-Worth Foundation for Women and Girls, Scholarship, California Government Professional Engineers Award, Marylin Jorgenson-Reece Award for Excellence and Scholarship.

He, who completed February 17, is working on a patent for the device. It plans to use its non-profit to drive consumer adoption of the device, especially making earthquake early warning available to countries and regions with low incomes and populations.

“The whole point is that it will be a consumer product, but I’m not focusing on the financial gain from it,” she explained. “I am focusing more on the science of this, the impact in general on people, and on earthquake disaster prevention.”

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