Smart fire detector could slash false alarms

A fire detector that can tell the difference between burning toast and a burning building could save money, annoyance, and possibly even lives, by cutting down on false alarms. German company Siemens will start selling the detector in the UK to commercial users by January 2006, and the technology could eventually make its way into homes, says the firm's fire safety manager, Andrew Morgan. The detector uses four sensors and a neural network to determine if the smoke and heat it's detecting are from a fire or are just part of the normal room environment. In the UK more than half of the 872,000 fire call-outs in 2004 were bogus, and 285,000 of those false alarms were due to fire detectors. Responding to false alarms costs money, and in the home annoying false alarms encourage people to disable their alarms.