On average, 38 children die in hot cars each year in the U.S. To try to lower those numbers, Intel has developed a device to send an alert to your smartphone to warn you if you have left your child in your car.
The Intel Smart Clip attaches to your child’s car seat harness and can warn you when conditions in the car are potentially dangerous and the harness is fastened.
The high-tech clip is swapped with the one already on your child’s car seat. The device communicates with an app on your smartphone. It displays a green check mark when your child is out of the seat but a red X when your child is still buckled in.
If you leave the car while the red X is displayed, the app will sound off an alarm.
“The alert will continue to go off, even if we acknowledge it, it will continue to go off every 20 seconds until we’re actually back in range of the car seat clip and we’ve actually unclipped it,” said Marcie Miller, a business development professional with Intel who demonstrated the product.
Miller not only put the system to the test at work but also at home with her 8-month-old daughter.
“Nothing is going to be there to replace the responsibility I have as a parent, but something like this gives me peace of mind on those crazy days that working parents have,” she said.
Sadly, there’s a need for such a device because stats show more than half of child-hot-car deaths are blamed on the caregiver simply forgetting the child was in the car.
Cars heat up quickly, especially in the summer. A vehicle can heat up 20 degrees in just 10 minutes. Plus, children’s body temperatures can even increase up to five times faster than adults’, according to researchers at San Francisco State University.
“Although there are people who think this would never happen to them, I think enough of us hear the tragedies over and over and how quickly your car can get hot,” Miller said.
The app keeps track of the temperature in the car and also the sensor’s battery life.
The clever clip got a lot of attention at CES last week. Miller says the feedback at the show was very positive and Intel hopes to have the product on the market by the end of the year.
The Intel Smart Clip doesn’t have a price tag just yet, but Miller says Intel wants to keep it affordable for all families and they’re shooting for a price point below $100.
