Optimizing smoke alarm signals: Testing the effectiveness of children's smoke alarms for sleeping adults

Being asleep is an important risk factor for death during a residential fire; however, the high-frequency tone smoke alarms in many homes will not adequately awaken children who are old enough to self-rescue. In a series of previous studies, we identified smoke alarm signals that effectively awaken children 5-12 years old and prompt their escape. Because it is impractical to have separate alarms for children and adults in a household, the purpose of this study is to test whether alarms that are effective in awakening children and prompting their escape are also effective among adults.

Using a randomized, non-blinded, repeated measures design, 150 adults 20-49 years old were exposed during stage 4 sleep to four different smoke alarms. Statistical tests included the Kaplan-Meier estimator, generalized Wilcoxon test, and hazard ratios with Wald's 95% confidence intervals.

The median age of study subjects was 30.0 years and 67.3% were female. Almost all (n = 149) subjects awakened and performed the escape procedure to all four alarms; one individual did not awaken or escape to the high-frequency tone alarm. The median time-to-awaken was 2.0 s for the high-frequency tone alarm and 1.0 s for the other three alarms. The median time-to-escape for the high-frequency tone alarm was 12.0 s, compared with 10.0 s for the low-frequency tone alarm and 9.0 s each for the female and male voice alarms. All pairwise comparisons between the high-frequency tone alarm and each of the other three alarms were statistically significant for the probability functions for time-to-awaken and time-to-escape. There were no significant differences in these outcome measures between the latter three alarms, except for female voice versus low-frequency tone alarms for time-to-escape.

All alarms performed well, demonstrating that smoke alarms developed for the unique developmental requirements of sleeping children are also effective among sleeping adults. Compared with a high-frequency tone alarm, use of these alarms may reduce residential fire-related injuries and deaths among children, while also successfully alerting adult members of the household.