Gesture Controlled Hospital Beds for Home Care

This article introduces a gesture-based user interface for hospital beds. This interface enables caregivers to focus on their patients and have both hands available for mobilizing and transferring them. Gestures are detected either via static (96% sensitivity) or dynamic gestures (67.5% sensitivity) and might be corrected by an extra repetition. Once gestures are correctly detected, caregivers can trigger bed movements via a foot switch as a hands-free operation, which as well functions as a dead man button. The evaluation of the usability through interviews with caregivers highlighted the system's general applicability, but as well some future challenges that have to be solved in order to achieve a system for every-day use.