Concept and design of automated moving device for healthcare equipment

Abstract

The physical wear of health professionals arises mainly from the movement of people with reduced mobility, transport of stretchers, hospital beds and hospital carts. There is a lack of equipment that helps these professionals to move patients in hospital beds or stretchers. This work aims to design an equipment that removes health professionals' function of moving patients from beds to stretchers, being able to move patients around the hospital in a bed. Added to this challenge was the diversification of models of hospital beds, making it necessary for the equipment to adapt to all beds. The design process included several finite element method analyses to validate the structure, and also a structural optimization, to reduce costs and reduce the weight of the equipment. This work successfully designed an optimized automated solution that can improve working conditions in the healthcare industry.

Keywords

• healthcare equipment
• finite element method
• hospital bed movement
• mechanical design
• structural optimization