A Low-cost automatic flipping patient bed

Abstract

A flipping patient bed plays an essential role for nursing work. Since nurses’ and caregivers’ tasks are greatly burdensome, in case they are not closely supervised, their bedridden patients who are in need of being turned over periodically would be at risk of suffering from pressure ulcers. It also causes back pain among a nurse or a nursing caregiver. For this reason, an innovative flipping patient bed is initiated as an assistive equipment to automatically turn and position the patient in bed for alleviating the possibility of pressure ulcers and facilitating nursing caregivers’ working operation. Thus, an inexpensive automated flipping patient bed for patients was invented, operated with pneumatics. Besides the mentioned automatic function, the proposed bed offers function similar to what general commercial electric bed do, as well as, its style and cushion material which is PVC. This allows this bed to be priced at 45% cheaper than commercially available electric beds. Manual and automatic modes can be selected with five main functions, namely normal function, header movement function, leg movement function, left-sided movement function, and right-sided movement function.