Natural disasters are one of the biggest problems in society.

Many, many people die every year because of them. This problem will be increasingly impactful, especially because of climate change, which will bring more natural disasters.

And even though nowadays we have excellent technology we are not able to solve this. As a Computer Science student, I couldn't let this happen.

Two years ago, I came home after a normal day in high school. I sat on the sofa, and I started watching this documentary about how animals can detect natural disasters, and I was wondering… Why don’t we do the same thing?

Well, First of all, How do they do it? How are animals able to predict natural disasters? Well, when a natural disaster, like an earthquake, is approaching, it generates pressure variations. Some animals, like birds, detect those variations days before the disaster, and then they fly away, and they are safe.

I want to do the same thing... But how can we do it? We can use the piezoelectric effect.

But… What is the piezoelectric effect? This is a property that some materials have, that when they receive mechanical tension, they generate electricity.

So we can use the pressure variations as mechanical stress, and we can use the electricity generated to activate a circuit that alerts the population from the disaster.

Finally, I decided to build a Natural Disasters detector using this principle. So I started working on this idea, and, first of all, I drew a small diagram for a circuit based on a piezoelectric material, and then I finished the prototype.

 

A crucial thing about this idea is that it is really cheap because I am only using basic electronic components; this is really important because the main problem with current solutions is that they are too expensive for developing countries.

This first prototype was able to: 1- Detect pressure variations 2- Alert the population after them. This is not enough... We need something else… Because… The difference between a human and a bird is that one is intelligent, and the other one... is the human.

So... apart from the piezoelectric effect, I am also going to use deep learning. I am going to collect data from previous disasters, and I am going to run some simulations and I am going to analyze the data in order to end up with an even more efficient solution.

Obviously, there is still work to do, as we need to bring the prototype to a bigger scale, and also, as I said before, I need to start collecting and analyzing the data. But the main idea is the same one; I took this problem really painful for society. I saw how nature solves it, and I tried to replicate this solution in the most efficient way to create a solution that could save millions of lives...

Because... “Intelligence without ideas is just like a bird without wings”...

PS:

If you want a summary of what I just said, you can watch this video where I pretty much repeat the same thing: