Once, deep in sleep, my brain assured me that a nuclear meltdown was imminent in whatever phantom building I was in at the time, when in fact it was my alarm. I did not wake, apparently because nuclear meltdown is commonplace or something. Matthew Ferris and Bruce Black have developed a smoke detector that would hopefully wake even me. The KidSmart Vocal Smoke Detector relies on the ‘cocktail party effect,’ where a person’s own name or a familiar voice is more easily discernable even against a great deal of background noise. Allowing the user to record their voice onto the device, the KidSmart plays back the recording and a standard warning tone when it detects fire.
NewsChannel11 Investigates Vocal Smoke Detector [KCBD via Medgadget]
Product Page [KidSmart]
