E. Harris Nober, who ensured that the sound level of residential smoke alarms was loud enough to awaken the deepest of sleepers and who designed flashing smoke detectors for the deaf, died of liver cancer May 23 at his Arlington home. He was 77.
Dr. Nober, a professor of communications disorders at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, tested how loud a home alarm should be and how long it would take a family to respond to the alert. His 1978 research was undertaken just as home detectors came on the market; several communities, including Montgomery County, had just required homes to have smoke detectors after early studies showed that they significantly lowered deaths from fires.
His work, funded by what is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped set the standards still used for the devices.
He installed smoke detectors in 80 homes in the Amherst area and, after waiting several weeks so he could take the families by surprise, used a remote control to set off the alarms. He tested not just the sound level but also the response times of people who slept behind closed doors, those who had drunk alcohol the previous night, parents of newborns and other people whose circumstances might affect their reactions. He found that it took an average of three minutes for people to awaken, call the fire department and leave the house.
Dr. Nober had long been interested in how people react to sound. He spent the early part of his career in a hospital as a speech-language pathologist and worked with deaf children to determine whether a child hears a sound or feels vibrations from it.
After his initial work with smoke detectors, he designed an alarm equipped with a strobe light that would awaken the deaf, and he tested whether it would also work for cognitively impaired people who live in group homes.
He graduated from Brooklyn College, where he also received a master's degree in 1952. He received a doctorate in experimental psychology from Ohio State University in 1957.
He helped establish and chaired departments of communications disorders at Adelphi and Syracuse universities in New York and at the U-Mass. in Amherst, where he lived from 1969 to 1998. He edited a textbook for students of communications disorders and retired in 1998, when he moved to Arlington.
He received the Career Award in Hearing from the American Association of Audiology in 1988, and he was a fellow and charter member of the American Academy of Audiology. He was a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
Survivors include his wife, Linda Nober of Arlington; two children, Roger Nober and Jenna Nober, both of Chevy Chase; a sister; and five grandchildren.
