Smoke alarm using parent's voice more effective in rousing children

Oct 2 2006

A new study has found that a smoke alarm using a parent's voice is significantly more effective than a conventional tone alarm for waking children who are sleeping soundly.

It seems that conventional residential tone smoke alarms as a rule fail to rouse the majority of children during deep, whereas a recording of a parent's voice did.

Study leader Dr. Gary A. Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio says they did not expect the voice alarm to be so dramatically successful.

The investigators conducted a study of 24 healthy boys and girls, ages 6 to 12 years, using a conventional tone alarm during the first cycle of deep sleep and then the experimental voice alarm during the second cycle of deep sleep.

The voice alarm consisted of the child's mother repeatedly calling for them to get out of bed and leave the room.

It appears that while 23 of the 24 children (96 percent) were awakened by the parent voice alarm, only 14 (58 percent) were awakened by the tone alarm.

Even more encouraging was that within 5 minutes of awakening to the parent voice alarm, 20 children (83 percent) successfully performed a self-rescue escape procedure that they were taught beforehand.

Nine children awakened to the parent voice alarm but not to the tone alarm, whereas none awakened only to the tone and not their parent's voice.

The children woke up in an average of 20 seconds with the voice alarm versus 3 minutes with the tone alarm and the average time it took to escape was 38 seconds for the voice alarm versus the maximum allowed escape time of 5 minutes for the tone alarm.

Dr. Smith does point out that the alarms used were much louder than any alarm currently available on the market for use by families and therefore cannot be assumed to support the effectiveness of any currently available smoke alarm.

It is significant that even though the researchers accounted for sleep stage they found there are still children who will not wake up to either signal, even at the 100-decibel level.

Smith says the study shows that the unique developmental needs of children must be considered when designing an effective smoke alarm for sleeping children.

Future research will attempt to figure out why the voice alarm worked so well, he said.

The study is published in the current issue of Pediatrics.