A Smoke Detector Using A Mother’s Voice Is Better Than One With A Siren

Sleeping children will be more likely awakened by a smoke detector that uses their mother’s voice. And it’s quite the difference – 52 % to 91 %. This might save children’s lives in the future.

If a fire starts, survival might be a matter of seconds. That is why many people have smoke detectors at home. But it seems that children are still vulnerable as they tend to sleep more deeply than adults. This is why experts decided to test the effectiveness of traditional smoke detectors with a siren with the effectiveness of smoke detectors using a voice to wake them up. 176 children participated in the study.

The experiment was performed four times with each child and with for different types of alarms – standard siren, the mother’s voice with instructions like “wake-up” and “get-up, the mother’s voice saying the child’s name and the mother’s voice that said the name and then gave instructions.

The results are quite surprising. The siren only woke 52 % of the children while using the mother's voice woke 86 – 91 % of the children.

Now the scientists want to find whether they need to use the child mother’s voice or if it can be just anyone’s voice as that could allow to bring down the costs of future smoke detectors by quite a lot. They also want to find whether the results are similar for adults.

Sources:

• https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476%2818%2931298-8/fulltext

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