Alarm fatigue is well-documented in clinical settings: when alarms are too frequent, staff begin to ignore them. The same dynamic applies to consumer safety systems.
The false positive problem
If Guardian sends a false alert every few days, circle members will start to assume that alerts are probably false alarms. They will respond more slowly, or not at all. When a real event occurs, the delay can be dangerous.
This is why Guardian uses a two-stage confirmation process. At S2, the wearer receives a check-in prompt. If they respond, the alert is cancelled and the event is logged as a false alarm. Only if the wearer does not respond does the alert go to the circle.
The tradeoff
The confirmation window adds 60–90 seconds of delay before the circle is alerted. For most incidents, this is acceptable. For a cardiac arrest, it may not be. This is a deliberate design decision: we judged that the harm from alarm fatigue — caused by frequent false alerts — outweighs the harm from a 60-second delay in most scenarios.
If you believe the wearer is at high risk of rapid deterioration, the Professional plan's staffed monitoring team provides an additional layer of review that does not depend on the wearer responding to a prompt.