The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that it may potentially save lives and avoid hardship for millions of people around the world by predicting impending earthquakes significantly in advance of their occurrence. Dozens of destructive earthquakes occur every year. Reliable and timely prediction of earthquake occurrence has been a holy grail of seismic research for many years, since it would offer the possibility of minimizing casualties and economic loss. This project proposes to improve the accuracy of earthquake prediction by unobtrusively monitoring changes in the behavior of companion animals (such as cats and dogs) and combining this information with data from seismic sensors and other sources. Successful completion of the project will allow the development of powerful data analytics for earthquake prediction.
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is addressing a very challenging problem of advanced earthquake prediction that has not been solved to date, despite significant advances in science and technology over the past half century and massive international efforts of governmental, academic and other institutions. The objective of this project is to collect animal behavior data using proprietary sensors, and develop analytics for animal behavior data processed in conjunction with data from seismic, GPS and other sensors, with the goal of establishing correlations between changes in animal behavior prior to impending earthquakes and the time of occurrence, location, and magnitude of the earthquakes. Numerous attempts to prove such correlation have been inconclusive to date. This project, however, takes a different approach by using proprietary sensors to collect objective scientific data from companion animals by means of sensors that are unobtrusive and do not affect the animals' behavior. This project aims to demonstrate data relevance on a small scale, using data collected from a small number of animals over a relatively short period of time in a well-studied and continuously monitored seismically active area with high probability of frequent earthquake occurrence.
