Researchers looking to build a better smoke alarm for children now have something to base it on: A mother’s voice.
A team from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has found that many young children are not awakened by high-pitched alarms, but are more likely to wake up if they hear a familiar voice.
The researchers exposed children to four different types of smoke alarms. Three of them mimicked female human voices, while the fourth was a more traditional high-pitched tone.
Approximately 90 per cent of the children were awakened by the three voice alarms, while 53 per cent were woken up by the sound of the tone.
Children also escaped their bedrooms much quicker with the voice alarms, doing so in fewer than 30 seconds on average. Children exposed to the tone alarm averaged a 282-second escape time, in part because they did not wake up until 156 seconds after the alarm began to sound.
“The fact that we were able to find a smoke alarm sound that reduces the amount of time it takes for many children … to wake up and leave the bedroom could save lives,” study co-author Dr. Mark Splaingard said in a press release.
Additionally, the researchers found that including the child’s first name in the smoke alarm’s motherly message did not affect how quickly the child woke up and left the bedroom – meaning the same alarm could work for multiple children.
Children are considered “remarkably resistant” to being awakened by sound, Splaingard said, and therefore less likely to escape an overnight house fire. Statistics show that children are more likely to die or be injured in a house fire than teenagers or young adults.
The research was based on a study of 176 children between the ages five and 12 at a sleep research centre in Columbus. It is published in the journal Pediatrics.
Splaingard and his team say they will now turn their attention to determining whether the motherly voice could be replaced with a generic female or male voice and examining how adults respond to child-optimized smoke alarms.
