RMCS

Once again, great comments and thanks for taking the time to respond. The design considerations for the bed have largely been taken care of, but any we've missed will be noted! There are several recurring themes emerging for the handset, so appreciate your comments.

Thanks for the replies everybody! The bed design is under control - it'll be an interesting project, and has had a lot of research / iterative development to get it to this stage. Some of the insights are very helpful here - getting a better idea of the way these things are used (whilst doing a million and one other tasks) will really help; and the way the existing products are failing is equally as useful. Would preset position buttons be useful, or more of an annoyance (i.e. supine / CPR, fowlers (or semi / high fowlers), bed exit etc.)? Thanks again for the replies - all comments are being noted!

I am not a nurse; I'm a designer - but would appreciate any comments. We're currently working on a novel medical bed with an extended range of movements and I've been tasked on the handset design. Having spent several weeks looking at existing products (not for inspiration, but rather to understand what's wrong with existing designs), it's clear that there are many questions that can't be answered from the isolation of a design studio! It'd be very useful to find out from the nurses / carers that reposition medical beds on a day-to-day basis what their requirements are. Finding out what you like / dislike about current products would be hugely useful and hopefully drive a better design. I've seen beds with 4 up to different handsets - and some of these become unusable when the patient is in certain positions (mainly reverse trendelenburg / some fowlers positions) - understanding any annoyances (including patient control of bed positioning!) will be great. Sorry if this post is inappropriate for this discussion area, but I'd rather get feedback from as many users of existing products as possible, because simply visiting 2 or 3 local hospitals will give me a very narrow insight into the real problems to be solved. I was recently reading a topic on this forum about an IV pole design - the comments made would have been so useful to the design team if only they'd received them prior to launching the product! Thanks for your time reading this.