According to DigoPaul, alarm means the signal or warning that warns the proximity of a danger. The alarm notice informs the community at large or a specific entity (such as fire or police) that they must follow certain emergency instructions given that a threat has been presented.
For example: “I think there has been a fire near here: I hear an alarm”, “The alarm started to sound and, five minutes later, the police were already at the victim’s home, ” The townspeople he got excited when the alarm that warns about the imminence of a tsunami intoned his first notes “.
The alarms that constitute the organisms that must respond to an emergency are usually part of a system that includes various states. The first of these is the pre-alert, which alerts those responsible for the agency about an incident that may take place. The second state is alert, which requires taking the necessary measures and precautions. Finally comes the alarm, which is the call to action.
In houses and buildings, whether residential, commercial or government, the alarm system is a passive security element (it cannot avoid a risky situation, but it warns of it and alerts the security forces). Some systems can automatically warn of a danger (by detecting an intrusion at night through motion sensors), while others require action by the user (when a robbery is initiated and an employee activates the alarm to call the police).
In general, modern alarm systems have a numerical panel that must be used by the owner of the protected property to create one or more security keys, which must be entered in various well-defined situations, such as when entering the property and before to abandon it. Motion detection, which automatically warns of improper activity in a building, is not always the right choice, given its degree of imprecision.
While motion sensors can be calibrated to ignore a certain range of changes in the environment, such as the shadows of furniture and plants cast by street lights or the flight of an insect, it is impossible to prevent certain incidents that require unusual actions by the owners themselves. In such cases, sometimes emergencies, the alarm becomes a nuisance, an obstacle to solving the problem.
On the other hand, the term alarm also refers to the application or device that is programmed to emit a sound at a certain time, in order not to forget a commitment. In the past, before the era of smartphones, people used to have a clock with a built-in alarm system on their light table, originally made with gears and later, in its digital version.
The alarm used to be used especially in the morning, to wake up early and be able to fulfill the typical obligations of a person: study or work. However, with the arrival of the digital age, alarm systems began to migrate from old-fashioned alarm clocks to be part of all kinds of electronic devices, from video game consoles to mobile phones, and in the same way their usefulness expanded.
Today it is common to program various alarms, also called notices, on the phones, to remind us of all kinds of commitments. In addition, it is possible to organize them in such a way that some sound every day, others only one or certain days determined by us, as well as instruct them to run indefinitely or only once and then delete them.