A new study from Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that a certain type of smoke alarm is more effective at waking children during an emergency.
Researchers compared smoke alarms with typical high-pitched beeps to those that played a recording of a child's mom telling her kid to wake up.
“What we can say from what we know so far is that a smoke alarm that used mother’s voice works much better than a high pitch tone alarm to awaken children between the ages of 5-10 years of age, and get them to leave the bedroom,” says Gary Smith of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
It took kids nearly 5 minutes to leave the room with the normal alarm sound, but only 30 seconds with the voice recording. The normal alarm only woke 53 percent of the children, whereas the alarm with the mother’s voice woke up 86-91 percent of the kids.
Researchers found that saying the name of the child in the recording did not impact their response time.
“We do know that the low-income households are the ones that have the highest rates of fire related injury and death,” he says. “So making a smoke alarm more affordable is important.”
Smith says the research only included mother's voices because only mothers brought their children to participate in the study.
In the future, researchers hope to test whether a generic voice has the same impact as the mother’s voice. If it does, Smith says that would help make a voice smoke alarm more easily accessible.
