In 2010, Xiaomi included an earthquake alarm in their proprietary MIUI ROM for phones and smart TVs. Collaboration with Chengdu High-tech Disaster Mitigation Institute enabled the inclusion of the functionality.
Xiaomi Phone With Earthquake Monitoring Function
The tech behemoth recently disclosed statistics demonstrating that it has effectively warned of 35 earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 or higher, with a total of 12.64 million warning messages delivered since its deployment in November 2019.
Xiaomi, known for its pioneering inventions, may be on its approach to launching yet another catastrophic early warning system. The business has promised a technology that would allow its mobile phones to not only receive but also monitor earthquake warnings.
The functionality would include connecting its cellphones with a pair of sensors that would continuously monitor the earth’s seismic activity.
This technology not only reduces the cost of earthquake monitoring, but it also significantly increases the number of monitoring stations, making the national seismic monitoring and early warning network more comprehensive.
As time goes on, the new functionality will be available on all Xiaomi phones. However, Mi phone owners with the MIUI 12.5 development version can apply to join the earthquake monitoring volunteers by going to Mobile Phone Manager-Earthquake Early Warning.
The Chinese tech giant went on to say that when the sensor on the phone senses vibration, it would use edge computing to determine if it is earthquake information.
If it is true, it will transmit the information to the early warning centre, which will utilise the information from various mobile phones as well as the seismic data AI to compute and decide if an earthquake happened.
If an earthquake is determined to exist, the magnitude, epicentre location, and time of the earthquake will be immediately computed, and warning messages will be given to the impacted persons in the surrounding region.
The number of earthquake monitors may be considerably expanded if every Xiaomi mobile phone becomes an earthquake monitor. As a result, areas without traditional earthquake monitors will be able to get early warning information, and the national earthquake monitoring and early warning network will be able to cover a larger area.
The functionality would not risk participants’ privacy in any way, as the business stated that during the process, it would employ “differential privacy” to anonymously manage all user data and so protect user privacy.
We do not anticipate this capability to be available on Xiaomi devices sold outside of China.