Hospitals are stressful environments where unexpected situations frequently occur. In Dutch hospitals 87% of the nursing staff reports experiencing physical stress because of the heavy and burdensome tasks included in their tasks. A portion of these complaints arise from pushing hospital beds to transport patients from one room to another. Most of the transports are unplanned and are performed by two nurses, since the task is too demanding and heavy to perform individually. This results in less nurses available at the ward, decreasing the time available patient care and a loss of productivity. This daily and burdensome task is completed by nurses approximately four times a day.

 

To reduce the physical and mental stress for nurses, Easy-Bed was developed in collaboration with UMC Utrecht and Indes. The Easy-Bed is a click-on assisting drive-unit with an integrated smart wheel for use with hospital beds. The first prototype was built together with UMC Utrecht for the WiBo Image 3 hospital bed used at the UMC Utrecht. However, the ease of use, robustness, and look and feel of this prototype needed to be improved. The product also needed to be made suitable for production and redesigned in order to improve the coupling on the hospital beds with an adapter. In the future the scope can expand to other models as well in order to achieve an universal bed mover.