American children keep dying of heat stroke after being left inside parked, hot cars.
These horrific and utterly preventable tragedies see the death, on average, of 39 children under the age of 15 from heat stroke every year after being left inside a parked vehicle whose windows are closed and whose air conditioning has been shut off.
Nearly every state has experienced at least one death since 1998. In 2018, a record number of 53 children died after being left inside a hot vehicle, according to statistics compiled by Jan Null, a Certified Consulting Meteorologist at the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, San Jose State University.
Null has been tracking child heatstroke deaths in vehicles in the United States since 1998. His painstaking research has revealed that in more than half of these fatalities, the parent or caregiver forgot the child was inside the vehicle.
Null's data shows the number of child hot car deaths for 2019 currently stands at 51, making this year one of the deadliest. Higher temperatures generated by climate change add to the danger.
This problem demands a solution and Canadian researchers have developed a novel solution.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a small, inexpensive sensor that triggers an alarm when a child or children (or pets) are left alone in vehicles. The new device combines radar technology with artificial intelligence (AI) to detect unattended children or animals with 100 percent accuracy.
