Smart Beds and Bedding Surfaces for Personalized Patient Care: A Review

Continuous patient monitoring during hospitalization is necessary to identify patterns of indicative risks or pathogens, whose early diagnosis and treatment is likely to lead to a reduction in morbidity and mortality and, consequently, a reduction in both the duration and cost of hospitalization. On the other hand, a patient falling from bed can cause serious damage to his health state, while the effect of pressure ulcers can be avoided by timely and accurate mapping of pressure points that inhibit tissue perfusion resulting in death. Recent technological advances and scientific achievements have introduced new and improved medical devices using highly-developed embedded control functions and interactivity. Current hospital beds include new forms of functionality, while still serving the same purpose. All of them are designed to fulfil a predefined purpose, whether that is to monitor the patient's vital signs continuously, in a non-obtrusive manner, or prevent a patient from falling off their bed or prevent the development of pressure ulcers. Over the last decades, this hospital bed evolution has brought a big change in both their standards and the overall patient care. In this work, we conduct a review of existing smart bed systems for patient monitoring, fall and pressure ulcer prevention from the state-of-the-art, focusing on evaluating smart bed systems that include any kind of smart features, like sensors and sensor mats, or exploiting Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and Wireless technology.