Mother’s voice ‘beats smoke alarm’ for alerting children

Adding recordings of mothers’ voices to smoke alarms could save children’s lives, a new study suggests.

US researchers found that playing a child a recording of their mother’s voice is about three times more likely to wake them than a traditional alarm, The Guardian reports.

The modified alarms also woke children more quickly, according to a paper on the study published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

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The research team, at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, said children were “remarkably resistant” to being woken by sounds because they have longer and deeper sleep than adults. “[High pitched beeping] alarms don’t wake up children well at all under about 12 years of age,” explains study co-author Dr Gary Smith.

The team compared the effects of four different smoke alarms on 176 children aged between five and 12 years old, “none of whom had hearing difficulties or were taking any medication that affected their sleep”, says The Guardian.

One alarm featured the commonly used high-pitched beep, while the others featured the voice of the child’s mother either calling the child’s name, giving instructions such as: “Wake up! Leave the room!”, or both.

About 90% of children woke for a voice alarm, compared with just over 53% for the traditional alarm.

And children assisted by their mother’s voice “escaped” from their bedroom within 18 to 28 seconds, while the median escape time for the tone alarm was 282 seconds, or nearly five minutes, reports Metro.

However, using the child’s name or a specific message did not seem to make the voice recordings any more or less effective. The team now want to explore whether a voice other than the child’s mother can get the same results, and if the gender of the voice even matters.

“If we can get something that can be generically developed and just taken straight out of the packet and is effective for children in this age range, then that is our goal,” Smith says.

Fire chiefs welcomed the research but said families should not worry about the alarms currently in their homes.

“We know smoke alarms save lives,” said Rick Hylton of the UK’s National Fire Chiefs Council. “They will alert occupants early, if working, fitted and installed in the correct location.”