Wasabi Fire Alarm Alerts the Deaf with the Power of Scent | Hacker News Reader

Wasabi Fire Alarm Alerts the Deaf with the Power of Scent

inventorspot.com

88 pointsrbanffy47 comments

This has been used for a long, long time in mines, where communication can be very difficult. If there's a danger, e.g. gas buildup, trace amounts of mercaptan are added to the ventilation system. Miners smelling that awful rotten scent know to retreat to the nearest shelter area in the mine. To signal an all-clear, they replace mercaptan with wintergreen.

My great-grandmother was deaf (since she was 10), and she knew if someone arrived after she went to bed (she was a farmer for much of her life, so she slept early).

How did she do it? Vibration. She could detect movement throughout the house. My great-uncle has a pretty good story of trying to sneak out/in after curfew.

So attach a motor connected to a smoke detector to the baseboard of a bed. For safety's sake, you'd use a pretty big motor. You'd also want to test it randomly.

They already make deaf alarm clocks for this. I actually use to use one for overnight alerts because I'm a heavy sleeper and I don't want to wake up my wife with my phone sounds.

This was one of the things I liked about my fitbit, the vibrate alarm was more than enough for me since I'm a super light sleeper, and I can get woken up without waking up my gf. In fact, her fitbit vibrate would wake me up but not her but she's the one wearing it.

Works pretty well on Apple Watch as well.

I went to RIT; the constant BZZZRRRT BZZZRRRT BZZZRRRT of deaf alarm clocks going off in several dorms at all hours of the day just became a part of life.

Same here, it has the ability to control the intensity and pitch of the tone, a unit to shake the bed, and the ability to flash a lamp of your choice. The lamp or the bed shaker is usually the way to go with someone else present, definitely.

I was gonna' ask why not just make it smell like strong smoke as to not confuse your instincts, but the key here is that it wakes people, not just notifies them.

Doesn't smoke also wake people? One of my roommates once tried to burn my door down. The yelling and screaming prior to that didn't wake me up (I thought it was just part of a dream, I guess it was a REM sleep cycle), but the coughing from the smoke eventually got me out of my slumber. I'm pretty sure the body has a built-in smoke detector.

I think you seriously underestimate the threat of a real fire - a mistake which a lot of people (rather sadly) make. People die in house fires because the do not wake up in time to get out - the place goes up pretty quickly, and smoke (+ poisonous gases) incapacitate and suffocate people before they even have a chance.

Many resources in this area, but as a starting point: https://www.ready.gov/home-fires

This is undated, but contains a video from 2010, an update from 2011, and a comment from 2008.

I feel like if this product were going to make it big it would have done so by now.

I would guess that the hearing impaired marketplace is small enough that if it had made it big I might never know. Maybe it did make it big.

This is an interesting "hack" and can potentially save lives regardless of commercial success.

Or you know, what has always happened in the past, and seems to work just fine.. super bright flashing light. Every school/govt building I've ever been that has fire alarms has these installed.

I don't know about you, but if your eyes are closed and your covers are pulled over your face (like me when I sleep), there's a good chance you're not going to see the flashing light. If you're deaf, there's a good chance you won't hear it either.

But you still breathe. You can still smell.

I am deaf. Those lights are freaking BRIGHT.. they might not wake me up from a deep sleep, but the vibrations from the sound and the super bright light, and I'd probably wake up. If not, my dog will definitely wake me up, that's his job :)

The problem with smell is, it takes a while to get dispersed, I'd probably smell the smoke about the same time as the wasabi. doh. I'm definitely wary of smelling smoke, it gets my notice for sure.

Both options should be complimentary to vibration. But best would be light and unique vibration. This way you can detect it no matter what you are doing.

Indeed. I can feel the noise from those loud building type smoke alarms, that schools and govt buildings install all the time. Household smoke alarms are pretty puny tho, I don't usually feel those unless I'm paying attention. They are such a high frequency they don't vibrate in my body much, and are not very loud comparatively.. (since they only have a 9V battery for power)

> But you still breathe. You can still smell.

Not if you have a cold.

True, but arguably the same can be said if you've got an ear infection or recovering from eye surgery or something; your respective senses aren't at full capacity then either.

I know that, in my experience, pungent smells have an interesting way of making it through some of the sickest olfactory sense.

I feel like the potent smell of wasabi can make it through even the most irritable of blocked nose.

The Fire Alarms I've experienced also are so damn loud and screeching I can physically feel the sound waves. I would be amazed if Deaf people couldn't feel the vibrations. Also, would they still be able to feel their ear drums vibrating?

> Also, would they still be able to feel their ear drums vibrating?

I imagine that being deaf is what prevents this.

Your ear drums are not the specific part of your ear that translates vibration into brain signals.

I'm aware. Being deaf is the condition of not perceiving those signals, wherever that fault lies.

Slight tangent here, but SV tech often gets criticized for building shit that people don't need (Juicero is a good recent example, but people said it about the iphone when it came out).

The upside of all that ridiculous tech for 22 year old dudes with too much money, is that it brings down the cost to manufacture valuable stuff like this, start hardware startups with good causes, etc. I know this is in a research lab, but there was a similar sonar-for-deaf-people one recently.

I find it hard to believe that a few nonsensical hardware startups are responsible for lowering prices. The production sizes are just too small to have an effect on China's massive output.

That's kind of the whole point - the big manufacturers affect only the upstream providers of various scaling technology, tools, components and manufacturing systems suitable for mass production of very large batches; but the startup&maker ecosystem creates a market for a different kind of tools, vendors and components - ones that are useful for prototyping and building cost efficient small batch products.

Well, the iphone...

But the "cost" I'm referring to isn't just money. It's the amount of people who have done it, the expertise that's out there, the incubators, the support networks, the people willing to invest in hardware, etc, etc, etc.

For deaf people? How about using light?

if the fire alarm is in a different room light would not work very well, with a strong enough smell no matter where you are in your dwelling you are going to notice it...

There are already phones for deaf people that you can rig to your house's light. When the phone ring all the lights of the house start flashing.

I don't see how smell wouldn't suffer from the same issue as light.

If you're in another room (behind a closed door, for example) I can't imagine it's tremendously effective

I'd hook the smell-alarm up to the ventilation system, and wire it to turn all of the ventilation fans on if the alarm needs to go off.

Isn't that going to spread smoke around and make the fire more dangerous? It would be better to just have smell emitters in every room.

I hope after waking them it doesn't linger too long or with too much potency... imagine "too much wasabi" in the air as you're trying to get ready to leave your dwelling.... your scalp just prickling constantly and your eyes and nose watering...

Yeah, but the alternative is burning to death, so some side effects are OK with me.

This could be great for children, they are often capable of sleeping through alarms, also given the sense of smell has the lowest 'latency' to the brain out of all our senses it would seem worth investigating, I'd been thinking of experimenting on my daughter, she narrowly missed out on an early alarm call concocted of rotten eggs...

The title of this post should probably be renamed to reflect that its from 2009 or 2010.

Deaf people must have alarm clocks of some sort, why not piggyback off those?

Searching Google shows most of the alarm clocks for deaf people have a tethered vibrating pad you put in bed next to you.

Sounds like an actual use case for iot. Some kind of standard protocol so different things can trigger the pad...phone, alarm clock, smoke detectors, etc.

I'm not deaf but I do routinely sleep wearing ear plugs. I currently use an Apple Watch as an alarm - it vibrates while the alarm is going off.

Before that I used to wear a Casio watch with the same vibrating alarm feature.

When do you charge your watch?

And here is when scent is not powerful enough.

www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/07/27/smelly-bombs-imported-from-israel-are-not-stinky-enough-to-wor_a_23050273/

Stupid question but wouldn't they smell the smoke the same time as they smell the wasabi

The smell emitter doesn't need to be in the same place as the smoke detector.

Why in god's name did they take blurry pixelated screenshots from a video as their only photos?

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