Micro-Cosmos

Many have spent a night in a hospital or know someone who has. The stories that accompany such an experience are probably familiar. Roommates that snore, visitors who are noisy and lights that are constantly on. All nuisances that made the stay not pleasant. Sleep in hospitals is important. It improves the healing process and quality of life in the hospital. Many people experience a disrupted sleep in the hospital. Solutions for this like earplugs or facemasks are invasive and do not solve the whole problem. There are also medical solutions but those are potentially harmful and do not provide the patient with the best sleep.

We from Micro-Cosmos are creating Maya, where the hospital bed becomes a private environment. The bed is placed in a dome like structure that can close over the bed. In the dome ambient noise is reduced and the patient can control the environment. Lights, sounds and media are components that can be added. We want to expand that with heating and cooling and provide a platform for patient monitoring. This will help with the patient wellbeing and sleep quality, shortening hospital stay and reducing medicine usage. Lowering the overall costs of hospital stays. We tested the concept during the Hacking Health Valley 2017 in Nijmegen. Here it was tested by healthy people and patients and considered an improvement to a regular bed. The cloth version already damped the outside sound and people did not experience any discomfort. This hospital bed version was voted the best innovation at that event. This will also our initial target, hospitals. There are currently around 40.000 Hospital beds in the Netherlands with the possibility to expand abroad. Beds in elderly care, medical rehabilitation or at home may profit from Maya. Our goal is to improve the quality of healthcare little by little, one bed at a time.