You know that you need to replace your smoke detector’s batteries when they run out, but you might not realize that you should also replace the smoke detector itself every 10 years as the sensors wear down. Yes, even your fancy Nest detector falls under this guideline. 

This might sound like a ploy to get you to shell out for a new alarm every decade, but you’re better off doing it for several reasons:

•  Peace of mind: You’ll know that your home has a working system to alert you in case of fire. You should make sure there’s alarms on each level of your home as well as one within earshot of your bed (many fires start when you’re asleep). Ideally, they’re interlinked so that when one goes off, they all go off so you get as early a warning as possible.

•  Limiting effects to your insurance: If you have a homeowner’s or rental insurance policy, you likely have a section on protections your home must have to qualify for the policy. This often includes having working, non-expired smoke detectors. Even if your policy doesn’t have a section on this, alerting your agent that you have non-expired alarms can sometimes lower your rate or work in your favor during insurance investigations after a fire.

•  Following other regulations: If you’re a landlord, you’re likely required to make sure your rental properties all have working, non-expired smoke detectors.
Consumer Reports points out that you can test your smoke alarm’s sensors using a test spray that simulates smoke, but that the best thing is to just replace an alarm that has passed its expiration date. Check for the date by looking for the manufacture date on the underside of your alarm (the part that typically faces the ceiling). Add ten years to that date and you have your expiration date. You might want to write this date on a piece of painter’s tape or on the outside of the alarm so it’s easy for you to see when to pick up a new one.

The Thermia online health educational tool, developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, has enabled one-month-faster prediction of seasonal influenza outbreaks in China, via its digital integration with a commercially-available wearable thermometer. The findings appear in a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. 

“The fact that we were able to predict influenza outbreaks faster than China’s national surveillance programs really shows the capacity for everyday, wearable digital health devices to track the spread of disease at the population level,” says the study’s lead author Yulin Hswen, who is a research fellow in Boston Children’s Computational Epidemiology Group and a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Although the Boston Children’s team has previously demonstrated that social media can be used to track disease, this is the first time they’ve shown that outbreaks can be predicted through an integrated wearable device and online tool.

“Collectively, we are still coming to terms with the data deluge from wearable devices, but it is imperative that we begin to generate value from this data,” says the study’s senior author Jared Hawkins, PhD, who is the director of informatics at Boston Children’s Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA). “From a public health perspective — as we have shown with this latest study — there is enormous potential for tapping this data for research, surveillance and influencing policy.”

Thermia, a fever educational tool created by the Boston Children’s team, works as a standalone digital application or can receive a child’s temperature reading directly through the iThermonitor, an FDA-approved, patch-like thermometer that is worn under the arm. This integration is possible under a license agreement between Boston Children’s and the iThermonitor’s manufacturer, Raiing Medical Inc., which is based in China. Although the wearable is available around the world, consumers in China have been the earliest adopters of the device.

In China, the Thermia-empowered iThermonitor has quickly gained popularity among digitally-savvy parents who have purchased the wearable device to monitor their child’s temperature. When iThermonitor detects a fever, parents can access Thermia via web or mobile and answer online questions about the child’s current symptoms and medical history.

Data collected from these interactions is anonymized and analyzed by the Boston Children’s team to track disease at the population level. Using this method, the team collected nearly 45,000 data points from China’s Thermia users between 2014 and 2016. They discovered that outbreaks of “influenza-like illnesses”, which had the hallmark signs of influenza, could be detected digitally in real time.

In comparison to the influenza surveillance data collected by the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) of the People’s Republic of China, the data from iThermonitor and Thermia identified emerging outbreaks of the flu an entire month earlier.

In contrast, China has 620 million mobile internet users who can theoretically access the standalone Thermia application from any computer, smartphone or even the Amazon Alexa assistant.

“In geographically large and densely populated countries like China, tools like Thermia can provide better on-the-ground disease surveillance than by relying on data that is only captured at the point of treatment in the clinic,” says Hswen.
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You can access Thermia to learn about your child’s symptoms and contribute to Boston Children’s anonymized disease database.

The promise of automated cars is that they could eliminate human-error accidents and potentially enable more efficient use of roadways. That could mean traffic reduction and lower commute times.

The Defensive Delay. One of the reasons traffic jams exist in the first place is due to our (understandable) behavior of waiting for the car in front to start accelerating. No matter what the cause of the initial stop or slow-down was, the ripple effect which creates the jam then has to release its tension one car at a time. The traffic jam continues to exist even though there is nothing preventing anyone's forward movement. If you're the 20th car in a line of stopped cars, you don't start moving until after the 19th car does. The 20th car waits for 19 discrete actions to occur consecutively before it can begin to move.

While autonomous cars may not fully marginalize this pattern – if for nothing more than the sake of trying to behave more human-like to keep people comfortable – their connectivity will certainly allow them to behave in a manner closer to a road train, wherein the 20th vehicle in a traffic line can start moving at the same time the 1st vehicle does. The reality is that the only thing stopping everyone from moving at the same time is their lack of faith in the person ahead.

Latest Developments. By combining several technologies that exist today, Ford says cars will soon help unclog traffic jams more efficiently than human drivers can. The concept, called Traffic Jam Assist, will use adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, and sensors from active park assist to keep traffic flowing efficiently and safely. In fact, safety is perhaps the biggest benefit to self-driving car systems, which can neither drive aggressively nor be distracted the way human drivers are. Another automatic driving tool, developed by Volvo and called City Safety, stops cars in potential accident situations on urban roads.

In addition to clearing the roads of human driving errors, automated navigation systems will reduce gasoline consumption as well as driving times. "If one in four cars has Traffic Jam Assist or similar self-driving technologies, travel times are reduced by 37.5% and delays are reduced by 20%. That’s because adaptive cruise control (ACC) is better at pacing the car ahead without continual brake, speed-up, brake cycles."

New Research. New research shows that adding just a few self-driving cars to the streets can improve overall traffic patterns. In the next several years, there will likely be an awkward transitional period when human drivers and autonomous vehicles share the roads. Consumer advocates, safety experts, and roboticists have expressed concern that mixing self-driving cars with human drivers could be dangerous. Recent field experiments in Tucson, Arizona offer a surprisingly optimistic outlook. Autonomous vehicles help minimize stop-and-go traffic, which is a bad habit that we sloppy humans perpetuate.

"Our experiments show that with as few as 5% of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior," said Daniel B. Work, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a lead researcher in the study.

Although there is an abundance of researchers figuring out how to build a self-driving car, nobody knows exactly how robotic cars will be introduced to public roads. Most industry stakeholders agree that eventually, when all cars are fully autonomous there will be major safety improvements. An often-cited statistic to back this claim is that 94% of fatal car accidents are caused by humans.
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Until all cars are autonomous, we will still have traffic jams caused by road construction, accidents, and rubbernecking. But the new research reveals that even by incrementally adding semi-autonomous features such as adaptive cruise control into today's cars, traffic can improve.

The average driver would be willing to pay nearly $5,000 more for a fully self-driving car, a new report finds.
Researchers from Cornell University found that the average U.S. household is prepared to pay $3,500 for some automation and $4,900 for full automation on top of the normal price of a car. That number varies widely from household to household—a large group of people were willing to pay above $10,000 for a self-driving capability, while many others wouldn't pay anything for it, according to the study in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.

"Automation of personal transportation is becoming a reality at a faster pace than anticipated," the study's lead author Ricardo Daziano said in a statement. "To plan for and analyze the large impacts of automation, policymakers and car manufacturers need to understand the market. Our study is an initial attempt to quantify how households currently perceive and economically value automated vehicle technologies."

To find out how much people valued different features, the researchers surveyed 1,260 people across the U.S. about hypothetical vehicles with different prices.
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The study also found that the demand distribution for self-driving technology was evenly spread between high, modest, and low interest, so researchers suggested that auto dealers should create flexible sale options for automation features as they become more available on the market.