My son has type one diabetes and is on an insulin pump. Because of this I have to check his blood sugar levels every two hours at night. I rely heavily on my iPhone 4 alarm. Last night went to bed with all my alarms set as usual. None of them went off. I woke up at 8 am in a panic not knowing what I'd find in my sons room. Thankfully he hadn't gone low in the night and died. Instead he was extremely high, which is also bad but not fatal in the short term. But still carries health problems.
My first thought was how irresponsible it is to rely on a consumer gadget for something life critical. But then I wondered, is there is any such thing as mission critical alarm clock that this person could find and afford? Can the average layperseon be expected to understand how various gadgets are prone to fail at such simple tasks? We rely on so many non-industrial grade things to not incidentally kill us: shoes, doorknobs, bubblegum, faucets, etc. Maybe it's reasonable to think of a virtual alarm clock in the same way, especially on a device that tries so hard to look and feel like an elementary object rather than a complex machine.