I have written about bed and mattress products before, however it is interesting, when looking at so many other product types, how little these particular ones have changed.
The last few decades have seen massive advances in so many industries with technological advances that would hardly have seemed possible just a few years earlier. Computers and wireless technologies are the obvious ones, but less obvious examples are how a domestic house is electrically wired or plumbed up. New flexible materials are used, fuse boxes are now “consumer units” and so it all changes.
What then of beds???
Well advanced foams in the form of visco elastic and a derivation of latex have changed the way that “some” mattresses are made, but there is not too much else to talk about.
Electric adjustable beds have certainly dropped in price, but there is no new radical design. Beds still look the same and work the same. They have a mattress and a frame.
If you look at beds made of springs, they may have stronger thinner wires, but the technology remains the same. In other words the changes are in the production techniques and refining the assembly rather than in radically new designs. An example being Talalay latex instead of Dunlop latex.
In other words, when it comes to innovations, most are aesthetic. Beds with unusually shaped frames, or beds that pop out of walls may look different, but the main part – the mattress - is pretty much standard. No one has yet come up with a bed that is pre-shaped to the curves of the spine (for back sleepers), or the curve between the hips and shoulders (for side sleepers).
If you look at orthopedic chairs, some researchers have started to develop chairs that have sensors that read the pressure point along the spine of the chair and adjust the chair’s curvature to the shape of the person sat on it. Other have multiple adjustments that make it possible to manually set the posture of the chair to the seated posture of any given individual. The same is not yet true of the bed.
So where does the future of the bed and mattress lie?
We have no shortage of mattress materials and constructions, but little in the way of radical new designs. Performing searches on the internet comes up with nothing. None of the major manufacturers seem to have anything new in the pipeline, so perhaps we need someone to take a very different view of the bed and to re-design it from scratch.
The last few decades have seen massive advances in so many industries with technological advances that would hardly have seemed possible just a few years earlier. Computers and wireless technologies are the obvious ones, but less obvious examples are how a domestic house is electrically wired or plumbed up. New flexible materials are used, fuse boxes are now “consumer units” and so it all changes.
What then of beds???
Well advanced foams in the form of visco elastic and a derivation of latex have changed the way that “some” mattresses are made, but there is not too much else to talk about.
Electric adjustable beds have certainly dropped in price, but there is no new radical design. Beds still look the same and work the same. They have a mattress and a frame.
If you look at beds made of springs, they may have stronger thinner wires, but the technology remains the same. In other words the changes are in the production techniques and refining the assembly rather than in radically new designs. An example being Talalay latex instead of Dunlop latex.
In other words, when it comes to innovations, most are aesthetic. Beds with unusually shaped frames, or beds that pop out of walls may look different, but the main part – the mattress - is pretty much standard. No one has yet come up with a bed that is pre-shaped to the curves of the spine (for back sleepers), or the curve between the hips and shoulders (for side sleepers).
If you look at orthopedic chairs, some researchers have started to develop chairs that have sensors that read the pressure point along the spine of the chair and adjust the chair’s curvature to the shape of the person sat on it. Other have multiple adjustments that make it possible to manually set the posture of the chair to the seated posture of any given individual. The same is not yet true of the bed.
So where does the future of the bed and mattress lie?
We have no shortage of mattress materials and constructions, but little in the way of radical new designs. Performing searches on the internet comes up with nothing. None of the major manufacturers seem to have anything new in the pipeline, so perhaps we need someone to take a very different view of the bed and to re-design it from scratch.
No comments:
Post a Comment