EaST: Earth Seismic Tomographer Building a network of volunteer smart mobile devices for seismic travel times Earth tomography

The recent diffusion of smart mobile devices deeply influences current technological landscapes also supported by a blooming market economy. New forms of users, interaction styles and ubiquitous paradigms are growing with this technological revolution. Connected mobile devices equipped with accelerometers represent, for geological Research, the opportunity to increase the information on several phenomena that are difficult to study because of the limited availability of observation data. Information provided from a cloud of mobile sensors, randomly localized on the territory, may contribute to extend the fixed nature and the very limited number of traditional Earth observation points. This paper describes the Earth Seismic Tomographer system, a mobile application that analyzes triaxial accelerometer data, aiming at collecting travel time information on earthquake events. The system relies on the voluntary participation of users that devote personal mobile resources to detect and provide seismic data to the central server. The Earth Seismic Tomographer adopts neural network classifiers to separate user movement from the seismic signal. The proposed system will increase the amount of information on seismic events enabling Earth scientists to study problems still undetermined with the currently available data.