ABSTRACT
Many products incorporate an alarm system to annunciate a dangerous situation requiring awareness and perhaps an immediate action. Alarms typically take a visual, audible, and/or tactile form. When an alarm informs users about a safety-critical condition that requires immediate action, the product should prevent users from disabling the alarm. The consequence of turning off an alarm clock might not be harmful. Certain alarms should be impossible to suspend or turn off, even if there is a potential for false and nuisance alarms. One reason to keep a critical alarm active is that the associated condition might require a rapid response. Another reason is that someone might forget to reactivate it. Someone might be looking away from a visual alarm but hear its aural counterpart. Sometimes, lowering an audible alarm’s volume is equivalent to disabling it because it will likely do a poor job of capturing a user’s attention.
