Anyone Could Forget a Kid in a Hot Car, Research Shows | Hacker News Reader

Anyone Could Forget a Kid in a Hot Car, Research Shows

consumerreports.org

13 pointsmhb22 comments

I take my 18-month old to daycare each morning, before parking my car a few streets away and catching the train into work. It is terrifying to think that one day I might just forget to drop him off.

My partner usually picks him up in the evening. About 6 months ago she was busy so I did it. I picked him up, drove home, parked the car in the garage and walked straight into the house. Something felt wrong, but it was maybe 30 seconds until I realised I'd left him in the car. He was completely fine, but it put the fear of God into me.

Anyway, I'll contribute my poorly thought out technical solution - a thermal camera that monitors the seats for warm bodies, if you lock the car when present it beeps the horn.

Some parents take their shoe off and put it near the child seat and put it back on when you drop the child off. If you forget to drop the kid off you will realize it when you notice you are wearing only one shoe. There are also apps that you can use to log a drop off so your spouse can see and verify.

Putting a air tag or other tracker on the child with a time based geofence is also pretty effective. It should alarm if the child is not at day care when they should be and alarm if the child is near work since you normally don't bring children to work.

AirTag works almost perfectly for that - you can give it area where it shouldn’t alarm when you’re not near it.

The problem is its accuracy- unless your house is sufficiently large or far away from parking it will likely not alarm at being left in the car.

How do you pay for the train? I'd come up with something you can stow next to him that you will soon miss if you forget to take it.

There are enormous pressures on a new parent -- stress about getting back to a normal work routine and lack of sleep compound into a unique kind of stress and things start to slip.

For me: I decided I could just slow down a bit. Standing out isn't worth the stress. I don't want to slack, but I don't feel compelled to cram productivity into every moment.

Recognizing a child is alone in a car seat seems like something modern machine image recognition should be able to do reliably. If the child is alone in a car and the temperature is not safe then it could honk the horn and announce there is a child in the car and call 911 and the parents

Or even start the engine and blast AC to make the temperature safe again.

Despite the first word of the title being "Anyone", it seemed to me until 5 minutes ago that this is an American thing. But 5 minutes ago ChatGPT gave me links to news stories of this sort of thing happening in many countries.

Apparently “dog dies in hot car” is so common worldwide it rarely even reaches the news.

I honestly don't know why you'd think that? People are people everywhere.

All people are equal, but Americans are more equal than others.

My car detects an attached carseat and flashes a warning when the car is turned off: please check back seat. More cars should have this warning

Please, no more ding ding. You have a backpack on your passenger seat, ding ding, passenger seat belt alert. You're driving at 5mph on private roads, ding ding, driver seatbelt alert. Your TPMS hasn't worked for 3 years, ding ding, 'service tire pressure system'.

Please let the user decide how they want to use the vehicle instead of a one-size-fits-most model. Also, please give me the option to add a baby seat monitor - if I want one!

It is entirely possible to make this user configurable with existing vehicle sensors.

My car beeps occasionally, but it certainly doesn't rise to the level you describe. Some of them represent real safety issues, even if you don't think they do in that moment. For example, my TPMS has saved alerted me to low tire pressure when I didn't know I had a leak, and the fact that it beeps a couple times every time I start the car is both helpful ("oh right, I need to get that fixed soon") and far from annoying.

Accidentally leaving a kid locked in a car on a hot Summer day is beyond horrific. How many kids should die before we think the annoyance of an extra beep would be worth it?

The problem is that the driver might have so many beeps, that they decide to ignore yet another beep.

I suppose a beep that sounds very different would get their attention, like for pilots in plane cockpits. A terrible stand-up comedian suggestion would be to reuse the plane's "retard, retard!" for parents who forget their kids...

> Accidentally leaving a kid locked in a car on a hot Summer day is beyond horrific. How many kids should die before we think the annoyance of an extra beep would be worth it?

It's not about annoyance, it's about whether it's effective at all.

If the car dings every time you turn it off to remind you "check back seat", it doesn't matter if the alert is completely unique and obnoxious and annoying, you will be trained to ignore it and it will quickly become ineffective.

There's a whole field of study here ("alarm fatigue" or "alert fatigue") that's generally looked at in terms of things like healthcare or aerospace. For example, there's a study in healthcare[0] where they found that when dealing with a system warning about drug interactions (including critical dosing errors, fatal interactions, etc) providers overrode 96% of alerts. Their "high priority drug-drug interaction" alerts were overridden 87% of the time, and on review only 0.5% of those were deemed appropriate. Other studies[1] have directly attributed this to repeated exposure desensitizing people and training them to ignore the alerts. People have died because of this.

I have a kid. I can't imagine the horror of being in that situation. I am certain that it would completely and utterly break me. I am fully onboard with a system that prevents this happening. I would be fully supportive of regulating a system that prevents this from happening. More unspecific beeps and dings is not that system.

[0] https://psnet.ahrq.gov/issue/high-priority-drug-drug-interac... [1] https://psnet.ahrq.gov/issue/evaluating-alert-fatigue-over-t...

I'd bet plenty of parents of given the option will not turn it on because "oh this will not happen to me, unlike those other neglectful parents"

The problem is it ALWAYS dings (the car seat is always there or it detects door openings) and so it just gets ignored along with the fifty other billion warnings it gives.

Which is insane because it obviously has much more intelligent sensors - if I try to lock the doors with the windows down and the wind blowing it screams bloody murder and refuses to lock because it detects motion. Windows up and someone moving? Same thing.

But it doesn’t beep based on that.

One of the infinite number of things that would be solved by having an always on companion error checker AI pendant.

Congratulations here is 1 billion dollars in vc money

As someone with ADHD, this was always terrifying to me. I developed a personal habit of not closing the driver door until I got my kid out of the car. So the driver door was always closed last. If I went grocery shopping, I opened my door, got out, got my child, got a cart, then as I head into the store, I close my door. Crazy, but if you have ADHD you know this is the kind of thing you have to do.

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