Smoke alarms and fire alarms are there to alert you to the fact that there is a fire a-happening in the near vicinity. You can’t really fail to notice a fire alarm bell. It is loud. Very loud. Annoyingly, ear-splittingly loud. So you hear the alarm, you vacate the building, some nice men in, let’s face it quite sexy, outfits come and put the fire out, everyone is okay and all that’s left to worry about is the clean up.
However, what happens if you didn’t hear the fire alarm in the first place? What if you are at home, in bed asleep, and you are hard of hearing. At night, you take out your hearing aids. Or you are completely deaf and cannot hear alarms. What happens then?
Well, I saw a natty little product made by a company called Lifetone. It is a bedside clock, but it is also a fire alarm. Now, an alarm is no good in the situation I’ve mentioned above. If you can’t hear a normal alarm, you can’t hear it. There’s no two ways about it. However, this alarm has three different signals to alert you to the fact there is a fire.
Firstly, there is an alarm. But this isn’t just any alarm. This is a 520 Hz square-wave alarm sound, which has been proven as the most effective way of waking people up in a fire emergency. And it isn’t quiet either. No, this little puppy pumps out a whopping 90 decibels – that is the equivalent of someone starting a lawn mower next to your bed!
The second signal is that the clock’s back-lit display flashes and displays the word fire. When you’re in a dark room, flashing is another method of rousing you from your slumbers – it breaks through the fogginess of your sleep and the sensory stimulation wakes you up.
The final signal is a physical one. A small clam shell-like device is placed between your top mattress and mattress pad, and when the alarm is triggered this little bed shaker unit vibrates strongly. The unit is only about the size of the palm of your hand, and plugs into the back of the clock. The bed shaker is an optional attachment, but if you are hard of hearing, it could well save your life.
So how does this gadget work? Well, it uses monitoring technology to tune in to and listen out for the sound of your smoke alarm. It will ignore all other sounds of the same frequency, which is usually about 3100 Hz, but when it hears you smoke alarm it triggers the alarm and the three signals that I’ve told you about above. Clever isn’t it?!
So, if you or someone you know is a bit mutton geoff then here is your solution. They don’t called it an ALARM clock for nothing you know…
