The Best Smoke Detector for Hearing Loss

The State of Smoke Detectors

Regulations vary depending on where you live. Some places require that smoke detector alarms go off at a minimum of 75 dB, but there are no regulations for which frequency they should sound at. Most alarms sound off at 3100 Hz, much higher than standard speech, which is around 1000 Hz.

This means that people with high-frequency hearing loss will have trouble hearing most smoke detectors. So why do alarms have such high frequencies? Most smoke detectors are small, so they have small speakers, and smaller speakers can’t put out low-frequency sounds at a high enough volume.

This affects millions of people with hearing loss, including those who have hearing aids or cochlear implants that they do not wear at night.

A study tested how well individuals with high-frequency hearing loss could hear smoke alarms.Bruck, D., & Thomas, I. R. (2008). Smoke Alarms for Sleeping Adults Who are Hard-of-Hearing: Comparison of Auditory, Visual, and Tactile Signals. Ear And Hearing, 30(1), 73–80. https://doi.org/10.1097/aud.0b013e3181906f89[1] It found that when a standard smoke alarm went off, participants would wake up only 56% of the time. Increasing this volume meant that participants would wake up about 92% of the time. That means 8% of participants still didn’t wake up even when a louder-than-normal alarm went off.

A Better Solution

It may seem like a loud, high-frequency sound is the best for a smoke detector, but for many people with hearing loss, that’s just not the case.

There are some other smoke detector options that don’t use sound, but most of them aren’t very effective. The aforementioned study found that bed shakers or pillow-shaking alarms woke up only about 80% of people with high-frequency hearing loss. The same study found that strobe lights could wake up only about 27% of these individuals.

The best solution is a smoke detector that plays a low, 520 Hz sound. When loud enough, this frequency can wake up 100% of participants and often does so within 10 seconds. That means even people with high-frequency hearing loss can hear the alarm.

There’s one downside to low-frequency alarms: the size. 520 Hz alarms tend to be larger than their higher-frequency counterparts. But saving more lives is definitely worth making a little more room for a larger smoke detector.

If you want to buy an alarm yourself, two available options are Lifetone and FireAngel.