Waking Effectiveness of Household Smoke and Fire Detection Devices

摘要

The present work consists of three experiments. Experiment A measured the frequency response and directionality of five typical home smoke alarms. In experiment B, normal-hearing young adults were subjected to alarm signals of 85, 70, and 55 dBA while asleep in their own bedrooms under both low and moderate background noise levels. In experiment C, subjects included families with and without children, varying types of housing, elderly, and developmentally disabled populations. Times required to awaken and evacuate all subjects in the household were measured. The report concludes that college-aged subjects can be awakened and alerted with alarm levels as low as 55 dBA (even with moderate background noise) and that evacuation times for families, geriatric and developmentally disabled populations seem to be in a range of one to two minutes.