Waze's New Safety Feature Reminds Drivers Not To Forget Their Child In the Car (go.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The navigation app Waze has released a new safety feature that reminds users not to forget their child, pet or other loved ones in the car before getting out. The feature, called "Child reminder," was made available to the public on Thursday, when Waze released its latest update on app stores for Android and iOS. The new feature comes amid concerns over recent child hot car deaths. Since 1998, there have been 37 child heatstroke fatalities on average per year in the U.S., according to the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University in California. Waze's Head of Brand, Julie Mossler said in a statement: "Just as drivers sometimes forget to turn off their headlights, they sometimes forget things in the car too. This new feature helps keep people present in the vehicle and gives them an important, possibly life-saving reminder, that drivers sometimes need." The "Child reminder" feature is opt-in and can be turned on and off in the app's "general settings." Mossler also said that drivers can customize the alert "to include their child's name or pet's name -- anything that will get their attention at the end of a drive." It will only disappear if a driver has entered a destination in Waze and has arrived at that destination.

Comments

Re:Really???

[quenda]

Yes really. Ignore the ignorant judgemental AC.

Plenty of good articles have been written on this awful subject. I doubt any of us here can do better.
But start with Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer-Winning Feature, 'Fatal Distraction' from 2009:

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist....

Re:What I would do:

[gweihir]

Actually, the way to deal with things like this is pretty much established: You do checklists and you never, ever skip them. When they have become part of the routine, you can rule out basically all such accidents that can reasonably be predicted. Of course, this takes a high level of discipline and that is why this is enforced only in cases where a lot of damage could ensue, like pilots. It is basically impossible to explain the necessity to ordinary people (look at all the "could never happen to me" idiots here), because ordinary people do not understand the mechanisms and that it can happen to anybody. It can also not be imposed by force, because it is too intrusive for a free society to tolerate something like that.

But if you want to prevent this happening to you, run trough a checklist that has "child" as one of the things on it whenever you lock your car. I used something like this because I kept forgetting my wallet or my work keys at home. After a few weeks it becomes a reflex which costs you a totally irrelevant 2-3 seconds each time and then the risk is mitigated.