Fighting Fires and Saving Lives with MATLAB

While about 96% of US homes have smoke detectors, only 73% of homes have working smoke detectors—leading to increased fire fatality rates. One primary cause of non-working smoke detectors is people disabling detectors because of too many nuisance alarms. To combat the nuisance alarms, Underwriter Laboratories (UL) created a new standard that requires smoke detector manufacturers to be able to differentiate the sources of smoke—food on the stove versus a burning couch, for example—to make sure that detectors remain on and active to save lives in the event of real fires.

To help smoke detector manufacturers meet this new standard, Analog Devices used MATLAB^® to analyze, develop, and test new detection algorithms that greatly reduce the number of false or nuisance alarms by leveraging MATLAB to handle very large data sets, tune algorithms, and generate embedded C code for test automation.