A Texas toddler's death changed the rules surrounding button batteries. Those rules, along with tougher marketplace compliance, are changing the personal safety market. Resonant™ was designed with that future in mind.
In October 2020, Reese Hamsmith was 16 months old when her parents in Lubbock, Texas, realized something was seriously wrong. Reese had become sick and was initially diagnosed with croup. Then her family discovered that a button battery was missing from a remote control.
An X-ray at the hospital revealed that Reese had swallowed the battery. It was lodged in her esophagus, where it began causing severe internal injuries. Doctors removed the battery, but the damage continued. Reese eventually suffered a hole between her esophagus and trachea and underwent multiple procedures during weeks in the hospital. She died on Dec. 17, 2020, at just 18 months old.
Her mother, Trista Hamsmith, turned that tragedy into an effort to prevent other families from experiencing the same thing. Her advocacy helped lead to Reese's Law, signed in 2022, and to new federal requirements governing consumer products that contain or are designed to use button-cell or coin batteries.
That may seem like a long way from a personal alarm on Walmart.com. It isn't.
Reese's story helps explain a question consumers may increasingly find themselves asking: Why are some personal alarms disappearing from Walmart?
The battery matters
Personal alarms are simple products. Press a button or pull a pin and a loud siren sounds. They are inexpensive, portable and intended to attract attention when someone feels threatened or needs help.
For years, many have been built around small button or coin batteries. That makes for a compact product, but it also brings the alarm under a specific set of federal requirements.
Under Reese's Law and the CPSC's implementing requirements in 16 CFR Part 1263, consumer products that contain or are designed to use button-cell or coin batteries are subject to requirements covering battery accessibility, testing, warnings and certification.
The requirements exist for a serious reason. A button battery can become lodged in a child's esophagus and continue causing severe internal injury. CPSC has continued enforcing those requirements against products that don't comply.
For manufacturers and importers, there is also a business consequence. Testing, engineering changes, certification, documentation and packaging requirements add cost to products that may sell for $10 or $15.
A new layer for imported products
On July 8, 2026, CPSC began requiring electronic filing of applicable certificates for imported consumer products subject to certification requirements. The change did not make every imported consumer product subject to CPSC certification. It changed how certificates for covered products are submitted during the import process.
Walmart Marketplace has told sellers that they are responsible for complying with applicable CPSC requirements and handling the responsibilities associated with imported products. Walmart will not serve as the importer for Marketplace products.
For a large manufacturer, that may be another routine compliance expense. For a small importer selling a low-cost personal alarm, the economics can be very different.
A product can work exactly as intended and still become too expensive or complicated for a seller to keep in the marketplace. The consumer may never know why. The listing simply disappears.
Resonant™ was designed for what comes next
That is the environment Resonant™ was built for.
Resonant launched Aug. 1, 2026, with a different approach to the personal alarm. Instead of relying on a button or coin battery, it uses a single replaceable alkaline AAA battery.
AAA batteries are not button or coin batteries, so the battery itself does not create the specific Reese's Law requirements associated with those smaller cells. The finished alarm still has to meet any other requirements that apply to its design, but the choice of a conventional AAA battery removes one significant complication.
The decision was also about performance.
Resonant produces a claimed continuous 133 dB output and up to 50 minutes of full-strength runtime from one AAA battery. Its acoustic system is tuned in the 2,000-to-4,000 Hz range, where human hearing is particularly sensitive.
Despite using a conventional AAA battery, the alarm has a 0.5-inch profile. A pull-pin activation system keeps the alarm sounding until the pin is reinserted, so the user does not have to continuously hold a button. An integrated LED safety light provides an additional function.
The result is a compact alarm built around a readily available, replaceable battery and engineered for high-output performance.
What consumers see is the end of the process
This is where the Walmart story becomes more interesting.
Consumers don't see CPSC certificates, testing reports, import documentation or the calculations a seller makes when deciding whether to continue carrying a product. They see a product page.
Then one day, the product they remember is gone.
That does not necessarily mean it was recalled or found to be defective. A seller may have stopped carrying it. A manufacturer may have changed the design. The cost of compliance may have changed the economics of the product.
Inexpensive products are particularly sensitive to those decisions because there is less margin to absorb additional costs.
Reese's Law was created because a very real and devastating safety hazard needed to be addressed. The requirements that followed are intended to prevent another child from suffering what Reese did.
At the same time, those requirements are influencing how manufacturers design products and how importers decide what is worth bringing to market.
That is why the disappearance of a personal alarm from Walmart is worth paying attention to.
The market is changing, and the products that remain may increasingly be those designed with safety, compliance and performance in mind from the beginning.
That was the thinking behind Resonant™.
Launched Aug. 1, the alarm was designed not as a response to a product category that was standing still, but for a personal safety market that is becoming more demanding.
Sometimes the first sign that a market is changing is not a new product.
It is the disappearance of an old one.
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