own to be reliable alarm indicators can in combination provide a highly reliable indicator of an alarm condition that is if multiple sensor signals are combined to produce a net valence the impact of a false positive or negative in any one of them is reduced an alarm condition classifier 35 may then identify the nature of the alarm condition detected by the alarm condition detector the functions of detecting an alarm condition 30 and classifying the alarm condition 35 i e identifying the type of alarm condition would be performed by the same process or step for example in a classification engine such as a bayesian classifier or neural network many inputs are combined to u201c recognize u201d the current system status determining the status for example patient has lost a significant amount of blood could be a classification derived from multiple simultaneous inputs for example elevated heart rate fluid detected outside blood circuit air detected inside blood circuit and patient weight dropping slightly each of these different inputs contribute to varying degrees and ways depending on the values of other inputs according to how the classifier is programmed in sophisticated systems that make use of artificial intelligence the interaction of the inputs can be complex but from the overarching perspective many inputs are combined to generate a current status signal and that status signal is either a normal status or an aberrant status the latter being one for which an alarm may be generated thus the process of classifying the status includes detecting an alarm condition put another way the current state vector is the ordered set of all current values of the sensors 10 20 classification reduces the large.