Smoke alarm of parent's voice more apt to wake kids

A conventional smoke alarm only has a tone. A study has found alarms with a parent's voice are more effective.

NEW YORK - A personalized parent voice recorded smoke alarm is significantly more effective than a conventional tone alarm for waking children who are sleeping soundly, a study shows.

Conventional residential tone smoke alarms fail to awaken the majority of children during deep, or "slow wave," sleep, "but the personalized parent alarm used in this study did," study chief Dr. Gary A. Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio told Reuters Health.

In the study of 24 healthy boys and girls, ages 6 to 12 years, investigators triggered 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 saying, for example, "Johnny! Johnny! Wake up! Get out of bed! Leave the room!"

As reported in the journal Pediatrics, 23 of the 24 children (96 per cent) were awakened by the parent voice alarm, while only 14 (58 per cent) were awakened by the tone alarm.

Moreover, within 5 minutes of awakening to the parent voice alarm, 20 children (83 per cent) successfully performed a self-rescue escape procedure that they were taught beforehand.

"We did not expect the voice alarm to be so dramatically successful," Smith said.

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.

"It is important to note that the alarms we used were much louder than any alarm currently available on the market for use by families," Smith said, 'and therefore, our findings cannot be assumed to support the effectiveness of any currently available smoke alarm."

"This study," Smith concludes, "illustrates that the unique developmental needs of children must be considered when designing an effective smoke alarm for sleeping children."

The next step is to figure out why the voice alarm worked so well, he said.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, October 2006.

- REUTERS