Smart devices and applications for disaster prepared homes and environments

The recent decade has brought great progress in technologies for the prediction and detection of increasingly more types of natural disasters. Today, advanced weather radars and decision support systems enable accurate predictions of paths and severities of typhoons, days before their arrivals, and tornados, tens of minutes in advance. Broadband arrays of seismometers and strong seismic motion sensors networked with computers running analysis tools can deliver early warnings of strong earthquakes to people in affected areas a fraction of a second or more before shock waves arrive. Tsunamis, landslide, and debris flow sensors and detection systems are other examples of networks of things that can warn us when such calamities are imminent.