Back in July, an earthquake rocked Metro Manila. Unbeknownst to most but noticed by some, a globally renowned company was helping everyone through the natural incident: Google. In the few minutes leading up to and during the 6.7 magnitude earthquake, Android users received important alerts warning them of the ongoing tremors. Though it wasn’t the dreaded Big One, the alert afforded attentive users a few precious seconds to either seek appropriate cover or stop doing dangerous tasks.
Incidentally, the tech surrounding Google’s earthquake alert system wasn’t just hastily built on ongoing databases or social media. Google actually packed in a fully responsive earthquake sensor for Android phones.
Faster than an earthquake
The forever-increasing speed of technology has always been a contentious element since the rise of smartphones. Developers and users alike have wondered how accurate or quick our favorite devices can warn us of things happening around us. There’s even an XKCD comic about how Twitter can warn us of an earthquake minutes before it reaches the reader.
Over the years, technology has developed new ways to deliver alerts. From simple weather apps to city-wide messaging systems, users can receive warnings in a timely fashion. Practically nothing is a surprise anymore with the right technology.
That said, Google has successfully developed a new system that can rely on other Android smartphones to accurately tell whether or not an earthquake is happening.
A quake detector in your pocket
Speaking to Android Police, the feature’s lead engineer Marc Stogaitis described how Google’s earthquake sensor leveraged other devices to tell users about the quake. It all revolves around the different sensors built inside your phone.
As it is, every smartphone comes with a host of sensors to support its different functions. A light detector can seamlessly adjust brightness and camera settings, and a gyroscope can support compasses, for example. With earthquakes, the biggest element to ponder on is a smartphone’s movement and vibrations during an earthquake.
According to the lead engineer, figuring out the metrics for detecting an earthquake wasn’t a problem. After decades of accurate seismograph technology, developers already have an idea on what they need to measure.
However, the technology does not stop there. Naturally, there are hiccups to relying on just a single (or even every) phone’s data. For one, a city-wide messaging system can set off everyone’s phone in a single area, potentially causing false positives. Plus, relying on a single phone is definitely tricky. There are multiple actions which can cause vibrations akin to an earthquake.
Crowdsourcing a quake
The feature doesn’t rely on just one phone. It doesn’t tap into every Android phone in an area either. Instead, it collates data from phones plugged into a charger. Naturally, a plugged-in phone is the most reliable barometer in terms of battery reliability. They won’t die out in the middle of an earthquake and ruin a source of data. Additionally, charging phones are often stationary. They won’t be affected by motions that mimic earthquakes.
Google “listens” to charging devices in an area. If the subset meets the criteria for an earthquake, the company quickly determines the earthquake’s epicenter (based on approximate location) and magnitude. Once the system declares that a quake is indeed happening, it sends out an alert to nearby devices and gives them the time needed to seek shelter.
The alerts naturally prioritize people nearer to the epicenter. But, of course, the speed will ultimately depend on the phone’s connectivity. A phone hooked up to a building’s fast Wi-Fi connection will receive alerts faster than a commuter’s phone on data while going through a tunnel.
Still, the short time that the alerts give users is enough to save themselves from a precarious situation. Though the feature can potentially warn users of quakes minutes in advance, Stogaitis says that it will more realistically push alerts five to ten seconds before the incident. However, five seconds is enough to go under a table and have some sort of protection against falling debris.
Still keeping things private
For anyone worrying about how Google is handling their data, Stogaitis says that the company removes all identifiers from the data except for approximate location. And, despite that, Google still maintains that the feature will be the most accurate that it can be. Either way, the feature will be useful for any earthquakes in the future.
The earthquake sensor is available for any Android phone running Lollipop and above. Naturally, the feature still necessitates that users turn on emergency alerts on their phone.
Apps
Canva teams up with SB19 to turn A’TIN’s passion into creativity
Campaign lets fans access assets, editable templates, more
Canva Philippines has joined forces with SB19 and Sony Music Entertainment to launch the “Kaya sa Canva” campaign.
This first-of-its-kind initiative is aimed at transforming the popular Filipino boy band’s fanbase into creators by giving them access to official design assets, exclusive templates, and powerful creative tools.
That’s of course as fans have a way of creating artwork, banners, and more outputs to honor their idols.
As such, the partnership enables the A’TIN (SB19’s fanbase) to access the Canva-exclusive SB19’s Creative Hub.
This dedicated space lets fans access assets, including SB19-inspired sticker packs, custom typography, and editable templates inspired by the group.
Fans around the world will initially have access to templates for photo-booth strips, wallpapers, posters, and videos.
The campaign will then expand with Canva-exclusive assets celebrating the group’s New Era, as well as their latest single, “Lawless”.
Meanwhile, the original song “KAYA” is accompanied with an upbeat music video, doubling as a love letter to A’TIN and a masterclass in Canva’s tools.
Every visual and animation is fan-inspired, a celebration of the creativity, passion, and dedication that’s defined in the community from day one.
Apps
Samsung’s bet on the future of connected health: Less data, more action
Inside Samsung’s plan to close the gap between your wearable and your doctor
Here’s a paradox worth sitting with: Wearable adoption keeps climbing. A lot of people now walk around with a sensor on their wrist, tracking heart rate, sleep, steps, sometimes ECG. And yet chronic disease rates haven’t moved.
That’s the problem Dr. Hon Pak, Samsung’s Head of Digital Health globally, opened with at a recent panel on the future of connected care. More data hasn’t meant better healthcare. His diagnosis: a first-mile, last-mile issue.
The first mile is that all this wearable data rarely makes it to a doctor in any usable form. The last mile is that even when a doctor says “lose weight, eat better, move more,” that advice tends to dissolve the moment real life takes over.
Picking up kids, caring for parents, getting through a Tuesday, it’s not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that knowing and doing are two different problems.
Samsung’s answer involves three things it says connected care needs to mature: meeting people where they actually are, building enough trust that people rely on the data, and using AI to turn that data into something a person can act on rather than just look at.
The Tuesday evening problem
Karthik Poriya, Head of Product at Samsung Food, framed the everyday failure point clearly. Picture it: long day, you’re tired, staring into the fridge. You’re not reaching for the healthiest option in that moment, you’re reaching for whatever’s fastest and most satisfying.
For years, nutrition tracking has focused on logging what already happened. Poriya’s team wants to intervene right at that decision point instead, pairing Samsung Health’s underlying data (BMI, antioxidant index, glycation markers) with Samsung Food’s recipe index of roughly 40,000 dishes mapped across 34 nutrients, so a health number turns into an actual dinner suggestion rather than another stat to check later.
Dr. Pak backed this with a small, concrete example from his own family: moving leftover cheesecake out of eye-level in the fridge and putting washed, sliced carrots there instead.
Kevin Duffy, CEO of connected fitness company iFit, made a similar point about exercise. The most effective tool for sticking to a fitness plan is a personal trainer, he said, citing roughly 80% higher adherence compared to going it alone.
The problem is cost: US$100 an hour or more in a major city puts that out of reach for most people. iFit’s bet is that AI can deliver something closer to a personal trainer’s precision and motivation at a price that isn’t elitist.
Duffy pointed to three reasons his company partners with Samsung specifically: reach (Samsung hardware is already in people’s homes, on their wrists and TVs), access to the biomarker data needed to build an accurate plan, and the fact that fitness goals don’t exist in isolation from sleep and nutrition data.
Trust has to come before any of this works
None of the behavior-change ambitions matter if people don’t trust the data or the company holding it. Rohit R. L., who heads Samsung’s Technology Innovation Lab in the UK, laid out how his team approaches that.
Privacy comes first: Samsung, he said, treats itself as a custodian of user data rather than an owner of it. On top of that sits clinical validation, meaning published, peer-reviewed evidence that a feature actually works in the real world, not just in a lab.
He gave a specific example: Samsung’s ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications have been clinically validated and cleared by regulators to detect signs of atrial fibrillation. He was careful with the wording there, detect signs of, not diagnose, since that distinction matters both medically and legally.
A separate study on fall detection for elderly users turned up a more human finding. The detection algorithm worked well in testing, but in real life people don’t wear their watches around the clock, and falls don’t happen on a schedule.
Dr. Pak drew a useful comparison: nobody tells their MRI technician they’re going to fidget through the scan, but with a wearable, you don’t get to control how or when someone wears it. Real-world validation has to account for that.
On the infrastructure side, Rohit described a three-layer privacy approach: on-device protection through Samsung’s Knox security framework, GDPR-compliant data handling, and alignment with the European Health Data Space, including a decentralized clinical trial system where patient identity stays with the hospital rather than moving to Samsung’s side.
Where AI actually comes in
The most technically dense part of the discussion came from Otavio Penatti, who leads Samsung’s Health AI R&D team in Brazil.
His team works on foundation models, the same category of large-scale AI models trained on unlabeled data that underpin most of today’s popular AI systems. Trained once on a huge amount of sensor data, these models can then be fine-tuned for many specific health applications, which tends to make them more accurate than models built for a single narrow task.
Penatti’s team is training these models on wearable sensor data (PPG, ECG, accelerometer) with the goal of getting the model to, as he put it, understand the body’s own signals well enough to translate them into something useful. Longer term, he sees potential in correlating that sensor data with clinical records to flag disease risk before symptoms show up.
Dr. Pak added a striking data point from Stanford research: a foundation model trained on sleep study data was able to look at just a 24-hour window of sleep and predict risk across more than 130 different diseases.
His takeaway was that the signals for a lot of future health problems are already sitting in the data being collected today, we just don’t yet know how to read all of them.
He closed this part with a number worth sitting with. A recent American Medical Association survey found that 97% of physicians have looked at wearable data at some point. Only 15 to 16% actually use it in day-to-day practice.
The top reason cited wasn’t distrust of the data, it was that the data doesn’t plug into existing clinical workflows. That’s part of why Samsung acquired health data platform Xealth, to build a pipeline that gets wellness data into the systems doctors already use.
Five years out
Asked to look five years ahead, each panelist’s answer tracked closely to their own corner of the problem. Poriya described a proactive dietitian in your pocket, one that doesn’t wait to be asked.
Rohit pointed to connected care that clinicians actually trust and patients fully control. Penatti envisioned AI that continuously links everyday behavior to clinical outcomes, catching problems before they start. Duffy’s version was a constant personal wellness coach, sifting through the data noise to tell you exactly what to do next.
The throughline across all four answers is the same: less raw data, more action. Samsung’s panel made the case that the wearable industry has spent the last decade solving for collection, more sensors, more metrics, more dashboards, while the harder problem, turning that information into something a tired person actually does on a Tuesday night, has barely been touched.
Whether foundation models and better clinical integration actually close that gap is still an open question. But it’s clearly the one Samsung is choosing to spend its next five years on.
Manila weather is notoriously unpredictable during the rainy season. Clear 7 AM skies easily turn into 5 PM downpours. For motorcycle-taxi commuters, arriving at work dry is a total coin flip.
MOVE IT aims to fix this with Ride-Ready, a line of commuter essentials sold exclusively on GrabMart.
The collection features a packable rain jacket, a helmet liner scarf or cap, and a refresh kit with alcohol spray, cooling wipes, and tissues.
Addressing rider concerns
Motorcycle-taxis are now central to daily commutes. MOVE IT reported a 20% year-over-year jump in monthly active users during the first half of the year. Still, riders consistently voice the same worries: sudden rain, punishing heat, and shared helmet hygiene.
“Filipino commuters have become extraordinarily good at adapting to city life. What they should not have to accept is arriving at a meeting soaked, or starting the afternoon already behind,” says MOVE IT General Manager Wayne Jacinto.
Jacinto calls Ride-Ready a practical fix to help passengers end their ride looking as fresh as when they left home.
Price, availability
MOVE IT didn’t just launch online. From June to July, interactive booths popped up in major business hubs: Makati, BGC, Ortigas, and Cebu City. Commuters could claim items and book rides on-site.
With traffic and bad weather showing no signs of stopping, Ride-Ready offers a simple buffer so riders show up fresh instead of frazzled.
The lineup launched on GrabMart on July 13. Prices start at PhP 275, with mix-and-match savings bundles available. Check MOVE IT’s official social media channels for more details.
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