As a mother of two who is often sleep deprived it’s too easy to imagine it happening to me.

If a sensor saves one child it is worth any price.

Why can’t cars be just as smart as my truck?

Couple those issues with entrenched routine (say, a decade or more of doing the same thing every day), and just this one time, on only a few hours sleep, you lapse and forget to drop the kid off at daycare, then think you already did. The baby is quiet, so there’s no reminder there to alert you.

I’ve had that type of situation happen when driving my wife to work. I forget to take a freeway offramp, and wham, my mind has me thinking I’m going somewhere else. My wife slaps me upside the head. Swap out my wife for a quiet baby, and if I don’t catch myself, maybe I have a tragedy on my hands.

There is no evidence to suggest implementing this technology will cost millions of dollars (the devices are already largely developed), and the extra cost to the consumer could be insignificant.

As for the 133 lives figure, 133 annual child deaths is enough to launch nationwide campaigns for pool safety, gun safety, you name it. Why hasn’t that happened yet for car seats? I’ll give you a good guess. When a kid dies unattended in a car seat, the car seat manufacturer doesn’t get sued. Lawsuits drive all sorts of things, including safety campaigns. If money were a motivator, we’d see everyone pushing for safer car seats. Instead, we blame the parent, ignore the problem and allow more kids to die.

Most people will have to know someone who experiences a death firsthand before they begin believing that car seats should be safer to save lives.

Judy, as per your question of what is total and complete negligence, I would say intentionally leaving a child in a car matches that description, not the overwhelming cases of accidents where otherwise completely responsible and careful parents find themselves suddenly with their baby dead. Not once have I read about an accidental death where follow-up information indicated the parents were anything but responsible. Meanwhile, I have read insinuations of negligence in deaths involving intentional abandonment in cars, child-finds-a-gun stories, etc.

We’re dealing with a complete mental lapse that has nothing to do with the value of the thing being forgotten. I’ve read more than one story about star musicians leaving multi-million dollar instruments in the backseat of cabs — instruments that were sitting right next to them in plain view. If we had millions of star musicians carrying multimillion dollar instruments in America, I imagine we’d have 133 lost instrument news reports every year. Importance and value are not even a consideration when someone experiences a mental lapse.