Curved Nursing Bed Surface for Low-Burden Posture Changes
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional nursing beds with flat surfaces struggle to facilitate natural motion changes for care receivers, leading to excessive bodily burdens and the risk of bedsores, as they apply unnatural forces during posture adjustments.
Innovation Solution
A nursing bed with a curved surface and a driving mechanism that moves portions of the bed surface in a natural, arc-like motion, utilizing a robot arm and multiple driving force input ports to distribute rotational power for vertical and horizontal movements, allowing for gentle and natural posture changes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If a flat bed upper surface is used with manual or power-driven movement, then the caregiver's workload is reduced, but the care receiver experiences unnatural forces and bodily burden during posture changes
Solution Approach 1:
The bed upper surface is changed from a flat shape to a curved surface shape, which enables natural motion similar to turning movement in bed. The curved surface allows the care receiver's body to follow a natural arc during posture changes, eliminating unnatural strong forces that were previously applied to the body.
Solution Approach 2:
The bed upper surface is made movable in both vertical and horizontal directions through a driving mechanism. This dynamic configuration allows the surface to move along a curved trajectory, simulating natural turning movements and reducing bodily burden during posture transitions.
2Reliability
If the bed upper surface is made movable to change posture automatically, then the frequency of bedsores is reduced, but the complexity of the bed structure increases
Solution Approach 1:
The bed upper surface is divided into multiple sections that can move independently. This segmentation allows different parts of the surface to move in coordinated ways to create natural turning motions, while also simplifying the overall driving mechanism compared to moving the entire surface as one unit.
Solution Approach 2:
The driving mechanism is designed to provide both vertical and horizontal movement capabilities through a unified system. This multi-functionality allows the bed to achieve complex curved motion trajectories using a relatively simple mechanism, reducing overall system complexity while maintaining effective bedsore prevention.
Data Source
AI summary
To provide a nursing bed capable of preventing bedsores of a care receiver while minimizing a burden on the body of the care receiver when changing posture. A nursing bed with a longitudinal dimension and a width dimension has an upper surface forming member which forms a bed upper surface on which a care receiver lies and a driving mechanism configured to move at least a portion of the upper surface forming member. The bed upper surface includes a curved surface which is curved downwardly in the width direction.