Earthquake Detection with tinyML

Abstract Earthquake detection is the critical first step in earthquake early warning (EEW) systems. For robust EEW systems, detection accuracy, detection latency, and sensor density are critical to providing real-time earthquake alerts. Traditional EEW systems use fixed sensor networks or, more recently, networks of mobile phones equipped with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers. Internet of things edge devices, with built-in tiny machine learning (tinyML) capable microcontrollers, and always-on, internet-connected, stationary MEMS accelerometers provide the opportunity to deploy ML-based earthquake detection and warning using a single-station approach at a global scale. Here, I test and evaluate tinyML deep learning algorithms for earthquake detection on a microcontroller. I show that the tinyML earthquake detection models can generalize to earthquakes outside the training set.