DERBYSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM — Scientists in the UK have found that smoke alarms may not wake children in case of emergency. <br /> <br />The research was conducted by Dundee University and Derbyshire Fire and Rescue. An experiment showed only 7 of 34 children aged between 2 and 13 were woken up by standard smoke alarms. Those who woke up were all girls. <br /> <br />The researchers suggest children are not pre-programed to recognize digital danger warning sounds, which could be the reason they fail to respond to standard alarms, BBC News reported. <br /> <br />A prototype new alarm would lower the standard smoke alarm frequency of 3,000Hz to 520Hz and include a female voice that issues a verbal warning. Young children are said to be more likely to respond to this new sound alert. The researchers are recruiting 500 families to test the new alarm. <br /> <br />“Boys are especially hard to wake, and we think they will respond to a human voice,” Professor Niamh Nic Daeid, a forensic scientist at Dundee University told BBC News.
