CNN is airing the bail hearing for yet another parent that left a baby to die in the car. Another stupid, senseless and completely preventable tragedy.
I’m trained as an electronics tech and even our school included logic circuits. It’s trivially easy to rig up a pressure plate, cover it in foam and fabric. Place in child’s car seat. If the engine of that is car is turned off and there’s more than 4lbs on that plate sound a buzzer alarm. After 5 minutes sound the car’s horn
They could even include a temperature check. If the car is turned off, over 4lbs, and the interior temp is over 85 degrees than sound a siren alarm. Something that people could hear a block away and can’t be ignored. It needs to be a unique sounding alarm that only signals a child in distress. There should never be anything in a car seat except a child.
I know the technology has been around for decades. Think of a self serve lane at a grocery store. It has a pressure plate. Try moving any item from the left side over to the right side without scanning. You’re told to scan that item and the Cashier is immediately notified.
Car manufacturers won’t add them til they’re required because they will increase vehicle cost.
Car purchasers don’t want them because these are things that happen to others not to them.
Realistically more kids die from their parents running into something (or being run into)than from their parents leaving them in the car so wouldn’t it make more sense to put our energies into fighting the self driving car battle?
I’d love for some Electrical Engineers to add their knowledge. I’m just a tech.
I’m pretty sure they could manufacture something like this for less than $30 to $40. The most expensive part is the pressure plate. The logic chips used to be sold at Radio Shack. Wholesale they cost a few pennies. It would require some connection into the car’s computer to check and see if the car is on. Or check at the fuse box to see if the accessory switch is in the off position. That would work with older cars made before computer ignitions.
I suspect the manufacture’s are terrified of liability. If the unit failed then the lawsuits would roll in. Wouldn’t matter if it worked in other cars 400,000 times. One failure and you get sued.
I’ll just note that to accomplish this, every car sold in America has to include the sensors and logic to note the presence of a car seat (or specifically a car seat pressure gauge) and every car seat sold in America has to include that pressure sensor and the transmitter to connect to that car sensor.
And note that this audible alarm that “can be heard a block away and can’t be ignored” will of course go off every time a parent turns off the car ignition (because you don’t pull your baby out of the car seat until after you’ve parked the car safely and have turned off the car ignition). Even if it has, say, a sixty second delay (you don’t want it much longer, as the parent will have already left the area) it’s going to go off on occasion while a parent is attempting to gently unlock the baby’s car seat.
Which will, of course, wake up your sleeping baby (who is likely now sleeping specifically because you took her for a car ride to get her to doze off).
And that safety sensor system? It’s of course got to err on the safety side, because any car or car seat manufacturer would get sued out of business if that sensor system ever failed to go off. So of course it’s going to go off accidentally here and there.
(Have I mentioned that my “low pressure in the tires” system, which uses similar broadcast technology, has been falsely claiming that my tire pressure is low for months now?)
And what happens when I turn off the ignition on my car and a baby is sitting in a car seat in the car right next to me? Does the car’s sensor and the baby seat’s sensor have to be coupled? What happens if the two haven’t been coupled?
I’m not claiming that your heart’s not in the right place, or that something can’t be set up to help here. But it’s not the same as the pressure plate on the self-serve lane at the grocery store.
(Which, by the way, has also gone off on me lots of times when I was too quick pulling an item off of the plate and into the waiting bags.)
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Wow. When I started typing this, there were no replies to the OP. I guess I have to learn how to type faster.
It is encouraging to hear that more qualified engineers have already developed these alarms.
I would not even suggest forcing the car manufacturers to do anything. That’s a lost battle from the start.
Child car seats are after market items that parents are already required to install. What I was suggesting was a device that sits in the child car seat (between the baby and the original cushion) and a simple connection to the car’s electronics. There are already after market places that install car alarms, car audio, etc. Those kinds of places could easily make the connection into the car’s electronics. (after a suitable connection was designed and manufactured).
Liability is a bigger problem. How is that handled already with child car seats? what happens if a restraint breaks? Or the seat shell cracks? The manufacturer’s need some liability protection. Saving children’s lives is more important than letting one or two people sue. You have to consider how many people forget kids in child seats vs how many electronic units might potentially fail.
This site says there are about 40 deaths like this every year. About half of them are caused by parents forgetting there child was in the car. The rest were children who were left there intentionally or who got there without the parents knowing about it. I assume that a large majority of those kids were in car seats, but I don’t know that all of them were. Compare that to the expense and the complexities involved and I’m not sure how much gets accomplished here. People are already very alarmed about this stuff. In that light it’s sort of surprising people aren’t already spending lots of money on alarms they’re unlikely to need.
How many people forget kids in car seats Since 1998 an average of 38 deaths a year with 52% of them caused by people forgetting their kids in the car. Lets round high and say it’s 20 kids a year.
How many kids die in traffic fatalities. The rates have dropped a lot due to car seats and laws about having them but that still leaves about 170 kids under 1 and another 400 from 1-3 yrs every single year.
You’re falling victim to the media frenzy. While every child that dies is a tragedy to someone we cannot prevent all deaths. We should focus our resources, our outrage, our energy on preventing the most deaths, not just the ones that hit the news.
Right now the best way to keep your kid safe is to STOP driving them places. Would be a horrible existence but
Well crap. I thought several hundred kids were dying in hot cars a year. Stinking media. I should have known better than to listen to those stupid fuckers. They exaggerate and exploit every story.
I recall we had a thread here last year. I think it was in GQ. I know forgetting babies used to be extremely rare. But that was when car seats were used in the front seat. Right next to the driver. Or they were in the back seat facing forward and you could see them in the rear mirror.
I was shocked to learn from that thread that todays seats are back-asswards. Kid in the back seat and facing the rear. The parent can’t see the kid in his mirror. Nor can he see the kid when he/she exits the car. So naturally babies are getting forgotten. I wish I had that thread bookmarked. It was several pages long.
I should have looked up the stats. My mistake. A child seat monitor would still be a great after market item. But, I agree people might not buy it. Even if it was $40.
There’s an even simpler fix for this. Tie a piece of cord to the child seat long enough to reach the driver’s door. Add a clip on the end of it and clip it to the door or the driver. It’s the driver equivalent of the aviation “remove before flight” flag.
Bingo. About 20 children a year are forgotten in car seats and die. About 2000 children die in car accidents per year, and rear-facing car seats cut fatalities by about a third compared to front-facing ones (and by about 90% compared to front-seat ones of either direction). So from a purely statistical standpoint, flipping the seat around to save maybe 5-6 kids because they’re more visible would kill several hundred per year (it’s hard to say exactly how many because I can’t find the stat for how many of the fatalities weren’t in a car seat at all). Hardly “back-asswards”, except in the literal sense.
Just another case of people being blind to risk probabilities – like the person who eats organic food because of the risk of pesticides killing them (pathogens in organic food will kill more consumers this year than the “chemicals” that would have prevented them ever will).
That’s what I’d do today if I had young kids. I’m a bit forgetful. Especially when I’m trying to solve a programming problem. I tend to think about a solution as I go about my routine activities. I’ve been known to overfill coffee cups, bump into doors etc. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a solution and make notes on a pad I keep by my bed. Its the price I pay for coming up with solutions to knotty problems. The subconscious can work wonders. I can’t force myself to always come up with a solution. Sometimes waiting for it works out best.
I do focus on driving. Can’t do that on auto pilot.
To begin with, it was infants that were turned around. Toddlers still faced front. Has that changed?
That reminds me of my ex in-laws. They had a dedicated clothespin on the dashboard somewhere (different location in different cars). If they turned on their headlights, the clothespin went on the ignition key. Made it hard to turn off the car without remembering to turn off the headlights.
Something that simple could work for babies, too. Paint the clothespin pink, blue, or something garish. Clip it to one of the child seat straps. When the baby goes in, the clothespin gets put on the ignition key, right where it attaches to the ignition lock. It goes back to the strap when the baby is removed. And it becomes a habit. Ingrained. If you remove the pin from the ignition, you open the door to get the baby. Autopilot working for you instead of against you.
You can’t really sell something like that as a product. But you can donate to public education efforts that encourage people to do it. It’s such a simple thing. Two added movements. Easier than brushing your teeth. Not that you’ll ever need it. But if you joined in and everyone did it, you’d be helping to save someone else’s baby.
Online, clothespins are $15 for 100. That’s fifteen cents apiece. I’m guessing you can get them at the dollar store for a similar price. It might be overkill to develop and sell sensors at $40 a pop, but at fifteen cents? You can cover 267 babies with clothespins for the cost of one sensor. And there’s no development cost at all. No installation necessary. No adjustments for different cars or different car seats. No batteries to go dead. It’s not going to glitch and keep beeping at you.
There’s just the promotion costs and the time to buy a clothespin. Heck, day care centers could have preschoolers paint them and then give them to parents with infants and toddlers with cute I love you and want you to be safe tags.
Well clearly the overwhelming majority of the population (something like 99.99%) has no problem remembering their kids in the car seat. So solutions being banted around here aren’t real solutions, there like the TSA, their appearance of solutions to hopefully make us feel like we’ve addressed the problem.
Scientist should identify people with the gene that are more likely to forget and then those people should just be sterilzed.
I did too but I’m on the fence as to whether it’s actually spam. The OP did ask about an alarm system that alerts parents to a forgotten child and here’s a solution.
