A Study on Examining User Comfort in Hospital Beds

Abstract

Hospital beds are one of the most interacted medical devices by patients and medical personnel. Whether the interactions between the hospital beds and its users become efficient or inefficient highly depends on comfort of the hospital beds. This study focuses on two aspects: determining the comfort criteria for hospital beds and proposing a checklist based on the determined comfort criteria to evaluate the comfort of hospital beds. To determine the comfort criteria, comfort studies from various areas and products are investigated followed by a product design decomposition and a semi-structured interview study. As a result, a comfort evaluation checklist is proposed to be used not only for evaluating the comfort of hospital beds but also be used as a guideline in the design process of hospital beds.