Getting Back2Bed: The story of how we are helping everyone sit up
Team update, Global Product Development | By team Back2Bed
Michael, a resident of San Francisco and a graduate student at Berkeley, loves a good engineering problem. When coursework isn’t stressing him out, he likes to hang out at a local bar with friends and discuss how the Giants could have done better in their last game. At home, he and his roommate often invite friends over for karaoke nights, and many of Michael’s friends report that he has a great voice. However, when Michael has to travel to visit his parents, he requires special arrangements. For all the things that Michael excels at, standing up and being able to walk isn’t one of them. Michael is a quadriplegic, which means that he has limited control over his limbs and cannot move around without his powered wheelchair.
In our project as part of Global Product Development, a class that we’re enrolled in at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, we are trying to help people like Michael gain independence over a part of life that is both immensely personal and highly recurring: sleeping in bed during temporary stays. For the 11.6 million Americans with mobility impairments, it can be near impossible to shift their weight in bed. Without external help, pressure from the weight of the body can cause the skin to develop sores. These pressure sores can become infected and lead to serious complications and, in some cases, even death. Current solutions to help with this are either too expensive or too bulky for travel. We wanted to change this.
As we conceptualized our project, it was important to recognize that an individual’s difficulty with moving in bed affects not just that person, but also those that assist in providing care, such as:
- Family members and friends
- Caregivers and attendants
- Medical professionals
Needs
To start our research, our team of four people conducted 10 interviews, asking people with limited mobility, their family members, and caregivers about their experiences in beds and during travel. Here is what we found:
Competitive analysis: what already exists?
Ideation and prototyping
After testing three different ideas with users, we found that users preferred a simple, reliable concept that would be easy to operate and install. This ultimately led us to our final concept: the improved foldable half-bed frame.
Development and manufacturing
We were fortunate to go on a Global Product Development class field trip to China and Hong Kong recently, during which we visited startups and manufacturing facilities in the region. We were struck by much of what we saw: how rapidly companies like PCH can build and ship products, how efficiently the students at the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute can build autonomous drones for motion tracking, and how you can apply for HAX and get mentorship for your hardware startup. We even saw a car-parking robot! Here are some of the key things we learned from these experiences:
- To create and launch a high-quality, safe, and reliable product, it will be important for us to build a brand and reputation around it.
- By reducing the number of custom parts, we can also reduce manufacturing time. Additionally, seeing how simple it can be to bend (versus cut and weld) tubing, we have selected a metal bending process for our prototype.
- Validation for manufacturing and assembly is crucial to success!
Follow along with the Back2Bed team and their Global Product Development classmates as they continue to develop their projects, drawing from expert insights, a field trip to Hong Kong and China, and more along the way. Over the course of the semester, we’re sharing blog posts from each student team here on Medium (read posts from Team JARAD, Team Million Hands, and Team Cycle Paths). You can also learn more about the course here.
