By Jake Copithorne
I'm a heavy sleeper. I've tried alarm clocks that wake up the neigbors, and I even tried my dad's portable bed shaker that registers on the Richter scale. But the only way I can wake up to catch my bus in the morning is my mom emptying an ice cube tray on me. Luckily, sleeping through my alarm only means a mad dash to the bus with my grumpy sister. But the almost 35 million hard-of-hearing people in this country find it even easier to sleep through an alarm than I do, and when it's a smoke alarm they can't hear, there can be deadly consequences. Worst of all, many hearing-impaired people remain completely in the dark about the danger they are in.
A recent research project report from the National Fire Protection Research Foundation entitled "Optimizing Fire Alarm Notification for High Risk Groups" found that many of the most common types of smoke-detector alarms failed to work adequately on test subjects who were hearing impaired. Bed shakers, pillow shakers, normal smoke alarms, and strobe lights were among the types of alarms tested. The findings of the study are scary for those who are hard of hearing. Disturbingly, 43.7% of the test subjects slept through the most commonm auditory fire alarm at its "benchmark" level of intensity. Additionally, 15.6% of subjects slept through even the highest levels tested of the normal alarm. Perhaps most alarming is the "complacency" the report's authors found in a survey of hard-of-hearing people, who are much less likely to be aware of a need for special alarms than the profoundly deaf.
According to the report:
Questionnaire responses indicated a high level of misplaced complacency among people who are hard of hearing in terms of their need for specialist alerting devices.... People who are profoundly deaf are typically very aware of their inability to respond to auditory cues such as the doorbell, telephone and alarms. They may install specialist non-auditory devices to facilitate such communications if their hearing aids provide insufficient amplification. However, many people whose hearing loss is less severe (the “hard of hearing” people) may not feel a strong need for such specialist devices.... Furthermore, people with mild or moderate hearing loss may not be advised by hearing health care professionals about what alerting technology they might need to obtain or whether they would be unlikely to wake up to smoke or carbon monoxide alarms
The worst type of alarm was far and away the kind of strobe light that is often the primary alarm source used in hotel rooms, with a staggering 93% of test subjects sleeping through at a strobe light intensity more intense than required by standard safety codes. In fact, 43.2% of the subjects slept through the light at the highest intensity. Bed and pillow shakers, while better than strobe lights and the normal alarm, were still far from perfect. Bed shakers woke 80% of test subjects at the baseline level of intensity with pillow shakers waking 83.4%. But while 11.4% slept through the bed shaker at the highest intensity, only 3.3% slept through the pillow shaker. The bed shaker was also the only alarm tested whose effectiveness was different for different age groups. Those over 60 years of age were less likely to be awoken by the bed shaker.
The one thing missing, in my opinion, from the alarms tested? An ice cube dispenser.
Posted by David at 07:18 PM on Aug 25, 2007 in COPING
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I agree with you. One of the things I've been saying is a smoke detector is only as good as whoever it warns. If nobody hears it and nobody gets the message, then what good is it?
I developed a power strip with smoke detecting shutoff in it. That way, if it's a fire caused by something left plugged in, maybe turning off the power to whatever's plugged in will prevent smoldering from becoming a fire. Like something against a space heater, or something else left plugged in like Christmas lights, an iron, a toaster, etc.
I have a blog of news stories about fires I think my power strip might have prevented. It's at www.ExactProductsInc.com/Wordpress
I have developed a prototype but haven't found a manufacturer to produce it yet.
Mike Dayoub
