Smart Bed Design for Senior Citizens: A Quality Function Deployment Approach

Abstract

With the increasing number of senior citizens, the quality of their life arises more attention. Smart beds can be used as intelligent tools to easy their life. Besides, as the user-oriented care becomes more dominant recently in healthcare industry, especially for the elderly, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is used for smart bed's design. As a quality control method, QFD is a systematic process to translate "voice of customers" into technical requirements by focusing more on users' needs and could contribute to achieve customers' satisfaction better. By house of quality process, this article points out that in order to meet customers' demands, designers should think more on sleep function and postural adjustment.