Carelink
A smart mattress that detects and prevents incidents in aged care homes.
Students from Aalto Design Factory and Design Factory Melbourne (DFM) teamed up to develop Carelink, a smart mattress to detect and prevent incidents in aged care homes.
The solution aims to improve the quality of life for elderly people in aged care facilities and reduce the healthcare burden of ageing populations with a simple, easily integrated mattress and software solution.
Carelink uses a mattress with a Graphene-based sensing material, produced by Imagine Intelligent Materials, which can:
- detect proximity, pressure, rapid movement – indicating seizures or pain
- moisture – indicating incontinence
- create heat.
The mattress also includes a call button for residents to intuitively call for help.
The project
Impactful
The smart mattress helps prevent falls, the number one cause of death in aged care homes.
Faster
Carelink’s alert system enables faster detection of incidents, leading to faster response times.
Innovative
The mattress uses Graphene, which essentially perform as “human skin”, providing important data and feedback.
Technologically enhanced
Via Carelink’s software application, aged care staff can receive notifications for any alerts detected through the mattress, such as a resident falling out of bed. The software app also includes each resident’s:
- information
- incident history
- current status.
Aged care nurses can respond to alerts and input incident reports into the app.
A web application allows the facility’s management to download reports of data input, allowing incident trends to be discovered and therefore the development of tailored preventative solutions for the residents.
With its streamlined approach, Carelink also aims to reduce aged care nurses’ workload and, in so doing, help facilitate more positive interactions.
Discover Carelink
It’s a smart mattress, designed to detect and prevent incidents in aged care homes, co-developed by DFM students.
Contributing students
- Ilari Tillikainen (Master of Mechanical Engineering, Aalto)
- Jessica Kearney (Master of Occupational Therapy, DFM)
- Liana Stratsianis (Master of Occupational Therapy, DFM)
- Jessica Wright (Master of Occupational Therapy, DFM)
- Aleksi Huttunen (Master of Mechanical Engineering, Aalto)
- Laura Kytömäki (Master of Collaborative and Industrial Design, Aalto)
- Pin Tian (Human Computer Interaction and Design, Aalto)
- Uyen Truong (Master of Water and Environmental Engineering, Aalto)
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