I can only speak for myself, but I wasn't discrediting the efforts or the need for it. I wasn't even trying to place blame on the parents.

My concern was with regards to the effectivness of such a feature and its long term effects. I hope you would agree this must be discussed.

You mentioned human behavior...how long until the numbers increase with this added feature? It will create that same false sense of "safety" that PPE does.

The father that lost its child does mention in the article that this is nowehere near sufficient and I tend to agree.

I feel it's one more of those "lawyered-in" features that a marketing department will love as it creates discussion, momentum and sales.

Seeing how most vehicles have an on-board display (regardless of your opinion on it) why not use that and have it linked to a rear-seat facing camera pointed towards the child? It should overrride all other displays when in P and/or when the handbrake is on.

In this visual world with screens all around us, I feel this might be a more suitable solution. It can be added to the dome light and it's more likely to have an impact and switch us from the automated process of thinking.

You got it....finally some light! :)

SA sounds awfully familiar to what's going on back home...it's just, we've been at it for the past 30 years without showing any signs of improvement.

"Liberation" comes at a cost, and that awakening, at least in our case, meant everything is free for all. Distrust of authority, desire to flaunt rules and a general entitlement combined with victimhood have all lead to us having horrible statistics.

This is one of the points I've tried to make with the Dekkers, Gantts and their band of cheerleaders. The last thing "developing nations" (i'm being nice here) need is to "embrace risk"(Dekker's been spouting this nonsense for some time now). They're already embracing risk quite succesfully, thanks. 

Some places need enforcement, others empowerment and others a mix of both. Some, just need everyone to stay away and not interfere. 

Darwin awards, natural selection, all these snide remarks help no one, I agree with you. I will give people the benefit of the doubt in saying that this profession takes its toll and gets otherwise morally sound people to look through a skewed glass. I know I have and it has made me question myself and my abilities. 

I'll go way off-topic, but is there a study anywhere on the psychological effects of people engaged in this profession? I've searched previously but haven't found anything.

Extract:

"This system doesn't detect anything," said Mr Harrison. "You could have a watermelon on the back seat. It doesn't detect that there is a living being there."

Mr Harrison, of Purcellville, Virginia, said the new system would not have made a difference in his case.

That's because it sounds an alert when the back door has been opened ahead of a journey. In his case, he stopped at a dry cleaners on the way to work that day in July 2008, so the system would have been disabled when he got out of the car briefly.

"If you make a stop on the way, the system is useless," he said. "Then you get distracted, and you go to work. Which is what happened."

"All they're doing is putting off legislation that would make them actually do something," he said. "There's no oversight and there are no consequences. It's just gobbledygook.

"They're trying to sell cars, not save lives."

In UK law consideration would be as potential unwanted intruders to site or as young persons in the work place.

It clearly states Institution of Occupational Safety and Health at the bottom of this web page.

Product safety is the specialism of others within the UK - Chartered Institute of Trading Standards and the Office of Public and Product Safety to name but two.

Certainly weren't any modules on product safety in the NEBOSH examinations I have sat.

Just because Nebosh hadn't even mentioned that in their syllabus, doesn't necessarily mean we should be oblivious to it, does it? I've done my fair share of Nebosh courses and while there's good info in them, they do encourage (unwillingly perhaps) rote learning and scripture referencing (sometimes that's painfully obvious). Hopefully their new revised GC will help tackle that.

The opening post was in the OHS section and it did get the ball rolling to conjecture and somewhat judgemental views. I blame this on social media (particularly LinkedIn) and the hit and run posts where most look at a video from a third world country (The East mainly) and start dusting off their CMIOSH and CSP badges ready to invoke the Darwin Award.

For someone that was so readily available to scold another for using the thank you button, you seem to have no issue in engaging in social media practices yourself. Just thought I'd leave that out there.

Have a great day,

Mihai

Originally Posted by: hilary

  How difficult is that? 

About 38 children a year in the USA difficult.

An answer is an earlier part of the thread.

https://humanfactors101.com/2017/05/21/fatal-distraction/

This is clearly a reality whether commentators think it should be or not. Thus there is a societal choice between attempting to mitigate and reduce those child deaths through some means or doing nothing. It seems unlikely that this rate of incident will decrease through the latter.

Originally Posted by: achrn

Originally Posted by: mihai_qa

Clearly this is an issue, but if we read the article, the father that lost his adopted child also states that alarms won't do much.

I don't find that in the article.  He says that the system being proposed by the car manufacturers is not very effective, I don't see him saying that alarms won't do much.

Originally Posted by: mihai_qa

Extract:

"This system doesn't detect anything," said Mr Harrison. "You could have a watermelon on the back seat. It doesn't detect that there is a living being there."

Mr Harrison, of Purcellville, Virginia, said the new system would not have made a difference in his case.

So you agree he does not say that alarms won't do much, he says that the system (quotr, "This system", emphasis added) being proposed by manufacturers won't do much.  He goes on to extol the system that does have an alarm - he wants cars to be fitted with alarms, but better alarms than teh systen the manufacturers want to adopt. 

He's not objecting to alarms, he's objecting to a particular system of alarms.

Originally Posted by: achrn

Originally Posted by: achrn

Originally Posted by: mihai_qa

Clearly this is an issue, but if we read the article, the father that lost his adopted child also states that alarms won't do much.

I don't find that in the article.  He says that the system being proposed by the car manufacturers is not very effective, I don't see him saying that alarms won't do much.

Originally Posted by: mihai_qa

Extract:

"This system doesn't detect anything," said Mr Harrison. "You could have a watermelon on the back seat. It doesn't detect that there is a living being there."

Mr Harrison, of Purcellville, Virginia, said the new system would not have made a difference in his case.

So you agree he does not say that alarms won't do much, he says that the system (quotr, "This system", emphasis added) being proposed by manufacturers won't do much.  He goes on to extol the system that does have an alarm - he wants cars to be fitted with alarms, but better alarms than teh systen the manufacturers want to adopt. 

He's not objecting to alarms, he's objecting to a particular system of alarms.

I've had another look at the posts in this thread, including my own and yours. Wasn't the debate about the proposed alarm? I even went further and said that just an alarm would likely not affect the occurence. I went on to propose an alternative means and went further in trying to explain some of the causes (Xavier123 posted a much clearer description of what I was going for).

That particular system of alarms is the point of discussion. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any proposal for a different type. Maybe I overlooked something.

411,000,000,000 car journeys in the USA per year, I don't know how many involve children but let's say it's 10%, so that would give us 40,000,000,000. On 40 occasions per year children die because they get left in a hot car. That's about one-hundred millionth of one percent of car journeys. So yes, we really should protect life wherever possible, and if fitting an alarm and warnings will help, why not do it, but there are two interesting questions arising from this.

Why go to so much effort to control such a vanishingly small risk? And, why don't we use more technological solutions to stop drivers driving while drunk or drugged; or breaking the speed limit; or going through red lights; or just driving badly in general?

After all, 1600 children die from other causes in the roads each year in the USA, that's 40x more than die in hot cars. Where's the risk calculation here?

John

Edited by user 16 September 2019 13:27:29(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Seat belts have been fitted to cars since the late 1960's whilst airbags were introduced because drivers were not wearing them (seat belt use not being legislated until the 1980's).

Interestingly the 101 cites the presence of air bags as a factor as to why children are in the back of the car.

Would these have been necessary had earlier technology been adopted in a timely manner?

There may have been a hint of sarcasm in Roundtuit’s OP, but it was tongue in cheek, self-facing (I think), and I wholeheartedly agree. How have we come to this, that we need an alarm to remind us we have children in the car?

This poor bloke must be absolutely beside himself with grief, and with self-condemnation which (IMHO) is completely unwarranted. He is not stupid. He is fallible. We all are. On this occasion, his fallibility, compounded by our modern societal need for more (because for some reason normally rational people are driven to work harder and harder to acquire more and better stuff instead of valuing the truths of life like time and enjoyment) has ended in tragedy. Take on too much and something will suffer, the law of nature. But that is not his fault in isolation. There are Mr Harrisons all over the world every day, it is what we do, what we have been getting worse at for many years, and only recently has society and industry started to question those values. He’s not a bad parent, he’s coping the best he can, making mistakes as we all do, and sadly sometimes those mistakes cost us dearly. I feel for him. Bring me anyone who has not forgotten something critical at some point and all you have brought is someone who has yet to do so.

One or two on here have lambasted others for not taking the idea of yet another alarm seriously. If the safety industry has a fault here, it is that we do not question the provision of each alarm seriously enough, and end up with so many that they become background noise. They become the norm, and once something becomes the norm then it goes unnoticed. The whole thing needs looking at again and I for one welcome that.

But to suggest that we ‘lot of safety professionals’ have no empathy for this man’s plight or are not taking the issue seriously and have no desire to solve it, is unfair, goes off-topic, and frankly is a little insulting and I won’t have it. If the responses are not what you were expecting, maybe you were expecting too much as the OP did not ask for them. (If you wish to raise the issue in the form of a question I’m sure you will get many well-considered and relevant replies). The issue, though tragic, has a fairly low occurrence rate compared to many issues we face as a worldwide society The pure lottery of life (at the moment) is that, if you happen to be the child of a middle-class American the dangers you face are different than those faced by another child whose only crime is that they happen to be born to a family in a war-torn or famine-stricken country. The death toll due to hot Buicks is considerably less than that of starvation of babies worldwide. There are alarms on the news every day about starving babies and are we listening? I think we need to fix that first. Or gun-related deaths at nearly 40,000 per year but barely makes the news.

One tragic death is no more or less important than another, but massive death tolls should be addressed first, that’s first principles. Maybe that’s why we didn’t get all hot under the collar?

Edited by user 17 September 2019 07:43:48(UTC)  | Reason: formatting

Originally Posted by: stevedm

Does ot not also seem strange to you that some of the people who have thanked you for the post are also the poeple who thanked me?...

Can only speak for myself :) but I use that button to show my appreciation to posts that somewhat improve/add value to the debate. I felt that the both of you have done so, hence my thanks for it.

However, this does not imply my full adherence to those ideas. Back on topic, and on to achrn's point, motion detection alarms would be flawed or less than desirable. Children spend most of their time asleep, securely fastened in that seat. My niece is like a rock when asleep and she's not pathological, she's just 3 years old. 

existing telematics in the car will allow that although not available on low value models...don't forget human factors in the design...  ;)

Solar (or kinetically) powered so it does not require batteries or plugging in to the cars electrical supply (a lot of  "accessory" sockets only operate on an ignition live basis so there would be no power after the driver leaves the vehicle).

Originally Posted by: hilary

CptBeaky

That is a very good suggestion, probably the best we've had.  Doesn't distract while driving, not easy to shut off or ignore - have you got a patent for this?

Well done.

Nope, although thinking about it you can simplify it even more. It doesn't need the weight sensor, just to know if the restraints on the chair are engaged or not. This would reduce battery use.

I would worry about compromising the safety restraints, but it may be possible to engineers a plug in to the restraint, meaning this could be backwards compatible.

Originally Posted by: CptBeaky

A weight sensor for the chair. Combined with an app on a phone. Should the car stop moving for more than 5 minutes (can be changed on the app) whilst the weight sensor is activated it messages/bluetooths the person's phone.

The car seat would need its own mobile phone system transmitter (or a car that has its own mobile phone built in) - it's quite unlikely that the phone will still be in bluetooth range five minutes later.  So that requires a subscription to a telecoms provider too.

I think a message on a phone five minutes later is much more likely to be ignored than the car horn going off when you're ten paces away, which is the system Mr Harrison endorses.  I don't understand what's wrong with that - what problem with that arrangement is this proposal trying to solve?

Sensors on the rear doors are not much use in a two door - the back pain was a great reminder the little one had been lifted in to their car seat

32% of the children who died in hot cars got into the cars on their own ..... how did they do this?  Do cars in America not lock?  OK, I'm being facetious before you all shout me down, but it does smack of a lack of care.  12% of children were left in the car deliberately (not to die one hopes, but the parents did not forget), 2% are circumstances unknown (??) and then you get the "forgetful ones" who make up the rest.  So we're really only talking about a solution for 54% of the deaths.

There is not going to be a "solve all" answer.  Each suggestion has it's merits and it's pitfalls but no one has mentioned risk homeostatis which is probably the biggest pitfall of the lot.  At which point do you stop relying on yourself and start relying on technology to remind you that you have a child?  One needs to be sure that when one puts a control measure in place, one does not introduce a different and potentially bigger risk by doing so.