Whereas a normal bed is permanently flat, a hospital bed allows the patient or their caregiver to adjust the head and foot sections independently to come to a semi-seated position or raise the legs or knees. This is an important feature for patients who will be spending a significant amount of time in bed.
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Foot section. Being able to raise the lower body is a great advantage for patients with a foot or knee injury or a condition that causes swelling in the feet because it encourages blood flow back to the heart.
Head section. The ability to raise the head and back to a semi-sitting position is helpful when the patient wants to watch TV or spend time with visitors. The upper panel can then be lowered again, allowing the patient to sleep comfortably.
Hospital beds, or adjustable medical beds, are made with heavy use in mind. For that reason, the typical hospital bed mattress is made from therapeutic foam that's both comfortable and strong and is covered in a thick, easy-clean vinyl outer layer.
To cushion the patient’s pressure points and prevent or treat bed sores, gel, foam, water, and reactive-air overlays are often used on top of the mattress. The head and foot sections of the home hospital bed can also be adjusted to change the patient's position, maximize comfort, and encourage circulation.
Because hospital beds can be raised and lowered vertically, they make it much easier for patients to transfer to a power wheelchair or mobility aid for walking compared to regular beds. This function also makes it easier to transfer the patient from one surface to another using a sit-to-stand lift or a regular patient lift.
Patients with good upper body strength can use the overhead trapeze bar that comes with many hospital beds to help them change positions and go from sitting to standing. For the caregiver, the adjustable height that is a feature of many hospital beds can help to prevent back injuries associated with bending over for long periods of time.
While two people can sleep in a regular bed, hospital beds are made to be used by one patient at a time. In a hospital setting, this is ideal because it gives nurses full access to each patient. However, in a home setting, couples may want to sleep together.
If the patient will only need the hospital bed temporarily while recovering from an illness or surgery, sleeping alone may not be a huge issue and could be the best way to keep the patient safe. For long-term use, consider two hospital beds pushed together (remember to lock the wheels) or an adjustable split-king medical bed.
Because of their utilitarian design, hospital beds typically come in a much smaller range of designs compared to ordinary beds—particularly as far as the headboard, footboard, and bed railing are concerned. If you're renting a hospital bed, you will have an even more limited choice of designs from which to choose. Learn the 7 most important factors when renting a hospital bed.
The good news is that—as hospital beds become more popular for home use—models are now available that look more like traditional beds and can be made to fit your existing decor. If you are looking to buy a hospital bed for long-term use, ask about the options available.
Hospital beds tend to be heavier than regular beds because of the strong frame, electric circuitry, hinges, rails, and head and footboards. Bariatric beds, in particular, weigh a lot more than regular beds thanks to their sturdy construction and extra-large bariatric mattresses. To make them easier to move, hospital beds usually come with wheels or can be broken apart, so you should never have to lift the entire bed.
If you or a loved one requires a hospital bed, consider putting the bed on the ground floor of the home in a room that's easy for the patient and others to access. When renting or purchasing the bed, it's also well worth having it delivered. Don't risk injuring yourself.
Semi-electric hospital beds and full-electric beds—such as the ones rented and sold at our Denver, Colorado showroom—need to be plugged into a power outlet to power the motor that adjusts the bed. The original manual hospital beds didn't require powering because they were adjusted via a hand crank.
While a manual bed might be too cumbersome for a caregiver who is physically weak, semi-electric beds offer a good compromise—the convenience of an electric bed with or without a hand crank to change the vertical height.
When you weigh all factors, hospital beds offer more advantages than disadvantages for a patient who needs additional comfort, safety, and assistance. The few disadvantages that can come with hospital beds (such as separate sleeping, aesthetics, weight, and a power source) are easy to work around and shouldn't be a problem for most.
If you need more help deciding which mobility aids would be most appropriate for yourself or a loved one, consult with your doctor, physical therapist, and an experienced medical supply professional. The right equipment for the right person can have a significant impact on their quality of life.
BY Katharine Schwab5 minute read
On my first night with the itBed smart mattress, I slept terribly.
The bed’s app had crashed during setup the night before. Since it had already taken longer than the expected 15 minutes to get up and running—a process that included connecting to the internet, calibrating the bed, and then setting the firmness of each side—I’d given up and allowed my side to stay at a very firm setting.
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I regretted it the next morning. After a night of tossing and turning, I woke, bleary-eyed, to find that the app had given my sleep a rating of 78. Was that good? Bad? Either way, I needed an extra cup of coffee.
itBed is a smart mattress–and, essentially, a giant sensor–created by the mattress company Sleep Number. Its embedded sensors track your heart rate, breathing, and sleep restfulness, providing personalized suggestions to help you sleep better. The mattress also integrates data from smart gadgets, like FitBit and Nest, so it can tell you if you sleep better when you’ve hit your 10,000 steps, or that the ideal temperature in your bedroom should be between 65 and 68 degrees–though you don’t need those products for the bed to track you. The bed ships right to your door, and inflatable air tubes inside the mattress can be controlled via a smartphone app and adjusted separately on each side. After setup, the itBed isn’t supposed to require any turning on or adjustment. All you have to do, theoretically, is sleep.
Given all the research that’s been done on how sleep is one of the keys to productivity, creativity, and overall health, products like the itBed seem like a sensible addition to the internet of things landscape. In fact, there are already a few other smart mattresses out there, like the Eight Smart Mattress, which also allows you to set a temperature for the mattress–the corresponding app will even wake you up at the most auspicious time with an integrated “smart” alarm.
These beds are part of a multitude of new internet of things-connected home appliances–some of which have been criticized for failing to deliver good UX while overemphasizing data. Ranging from smart ovens, to smart cribs, to even smart water bottles, these gadgets are designed on the assumption that tracking users inherently makes appliances more useful, and thus improves their lives. In my case, the itBed didn’t do either.
The itBed’s SleepIQ is the core of its UX. It’s a number-based “grade” that the mattress gives you when you wake up every morning, determined by the amount of restful time in bed, average heart and breathing rates, motion, and bed exits (and your own sleep goal, a number you set with the app). Determined by a proprietary algorithm, the SleepIQ number is supposed to empower you to sleep better–though how it does that is a mystery to me, and the company could not provide more information.
Over the month that I slept on the itBed, my SleepIQ only matched up with the lived experience of my sleep about two-thirds of the time. While my scores typically ranged between 70 and 90 (or a C to an A), often I’d wake up feeling drowsy only to have a score in the high 80s, or wake up feeling perfectly rested to a score in the 70s. After the election, for instance, I slept terribly for days–but my SleepIQ insisted I was scoring in the 80s. Sleep is a much more complex experience than any one number can express.
This inherently simplistic number drives the app’s interface, which is designed as if your score is the only important quantifiable piece of information. In the app’s “trends” section, the only representation of your data is your average score. Since it was difficult to know what exactly my SleepIQ meant, the average of all my scores put together (a 78 over one month) didn’t offer me any kind of insight into my sleep.
Sleep is a much more complex experience than any one number can express.The app’s visualization tools are out of sync with the amount of data it collects. It represents one night’s rest in a single graph of restful sleep, restless sleep, and time out of bed, rather than showing trends over multiple nights. Simpler systems, like the app Sleep Cycle, can show graphs of when you went to bed, total time in bed, and even how sleep quality is affected by the moon while only using your phone’s microphone or accelerometer. Meanwhile, the itBed has sensors spread out through the entire mattress but only offers a single visualization of your sleep and no long-term trends.
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These UX and UI problems were compounded by the fact that the bed wouldn’t always track my sleep at all. I was having internet issues (who doesn’t?) for about half the time I was using the mattress, and if the internet went out, the bed would disconnect without a notification–which meant that it wouldn’t track my sleep until I remembered to check to see if it was connected or not.
The part I was looking forward to the most was the personalized suggestions based in my data. Yet the recommendations were generic, like “don’t drink too much coffee before bed,” or “start your day in bright light,” or “a warm bath before bed might make you sleepy.” These tips come from Pete Bils, the company’s VP of sleep innovation and clinical research, but are not medically endorsed. The data analysis didn’t even give me any insight into exactly how firm the mattress should be for me to get a better night’s rest. After the horrible first night on a firm 95, I swung to the opposite end of the spectrum and spent the rest of the month sleeping on its softest setting.
Perhaps the itBed would have worked better if I had other smart devices to pair it with–then it would know, down to the step, how much I was exercising and how that might be affecting my sleep. But the efficacy of the product shouldn’t be dependent on me owning a host of other trackers to deliver on its value proposition. (For non-FitBit owners, the app allows you to add in your own activity tags.)
More technology doesn’t make every product better.There are smart devices that have changed people’s lives for the better, but simply turning home appliances into “smart” devices doesn’t necessarily make them truly useful. Last week, my colleague Mark Wilson called June, a $1,500 smart oven, “archetypal Silicon Valley solutionism.” He was describing the conviction that objects in the home need to be crammed with technology in order to be transformed into better products worthy of our 21st-century aspirations, and that every problem–including that you overcooked your salmon, or you stayed up too late watching TV–can be fixed with a combination of data, graphs, and push notifications. Beds haven’t required any buttons for centuries, and there’s a reason for that: More technology doesn’t make every product better.
As for the mattress itself? It did get squeaky, but beyond that, it was comfortable and cozy. Sometimes simplicity–or stupidity, by IoT standards–can be a virtue.
[All Photos: via Sleep Number]
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