According to a new study published Friday in the journal Science Advances, a smartphone is capable enough to act as an earthquake early-warning system.

The researchers said that a smartphone already serves a number of purposes by acting as a camera, calculator, flashlight and a pedometer.

According to them, the GPS sensors built into most smartphones are sensitive enough to detect the earliest signs of quakes that are magnitude 7 and stronger. They said that those sensors could be used to give indication of seismic waves in few seconds.

Study leader Sarah Minson, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Pasadena said, "The GPS on a smartphone is shockingly good. If you take your phone and move it six inches to the right, it knows with surprising accuracy that it moved six inches to the right and that is exactly what we want to know when studying earthquakes".

Scientists reached at the conclusion after understanding whether the accelerometers that come standard in smartphones have the ability to detect early signs of earthquakes.

The typical use of accelerometers in the phone is to let users know whether he/she is holding it vertically or horizontally so that the orientation of the screen is correct. However, the researchers were interested in whether the GPS data collated by a smartphone could be useful to detect earthquake.

A hypothetical dataset of cellphone readings were created by the researchers to be captured during a magnitude 7 earthquake on the Hayward fault in Northern California. Afterwards, they looked at data recorded by state-of- the-art GPS-based earthquake sensors in Japan during the magnitude 9 Tohoku quake in 2011.

The researchers concluded that after solving the problem of usual bumping of phones when someone drives over a pothole, trip on a curb or bound up the stairs, a smartphone can be used to register quake and an early-warning system to alert other communities.