An alarm is a warning or signal.
An alarm is a signal or warning that warns of the proximity of danger . The alarm notice informs the general community or a specific entity (such as firefighters or police) that they must follow certain emergency instructions because a threat has occurred.
For example: “I think there has been a fire near here: I hear an alarm” , “The alarm started ringing and, five minutes later, the police were already at the victim's home ”, “The townspeople “was in an uproar when the alarm warning of the imminence of a tsunami sounded its first notes.”
The alarms that constitute the organizations that must respond to an emergency are usually part of a system that includes various states. The first of them is the pre-alert , which notifies those responsible for the organization about an incident that may take place. The second state is alert , which requires taking the necessary measures and precautions. Finally the alarm arrives, which is the call to action.
Alarm system
In houses and buildings, whether residential, commercial or government, the alarm system is a passive security element (it cannot prevent a risk situation, but it warns of it and notifies the security forces). Some systems can warn of danger automatically (by detecting an intrusion at night through motion sensors), while others require action on the part of the user (when a burglary begins and an employee activates the alarm to warn call the police ).
Modern alarm systems generally 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 inappropriate activity in a building, is not always the right option, 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 irregular actions by the owners themselves. In such cases, sometimes emergencies, the alarm becomes a nuisance, an obstacle towards solving the problem.
Many people use an alarm to wake up at a certain time.
Resource to wake up on time
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, with the purpose of not forgetting a commitment. In the past, before the era of smartphones, people used to have a clock with an alarm system included on their nightstand, initially made with gears and later, in its digital version.
The alarm used to be used especially in the mornings, to wake up early and be able to fulfill a person's typical obligations: study or work. However, with the arrival of the digital age, alarm systems began to migrate from old-fashioned alarm clocks to become part of all types of electronic devices, from video game consoles to mobile phones, and their usefulness also expanded.
Nowadays it is common to program various alarms, also called notices , on phones, to remind us of all kinds of commitments . In addition, it is possible to organize them so that some ring every day, others only on one or certain days determined by us, as well as tell them to run indefinitely or only once and then be deleted.