SPH Medical Reusable Air Transfer Mattress
In 2021, SPH Medical asked Rennacker Studio to help them design a product for hospital staff and caregivers to safely transfer immobilized patients from one surface to another that utilizes and reinforces the use of safe patient handling (SPH) techniques. The team at Rennacker Studio in collaboration with SPH Medical and their manufacturers were able to design an inflatable air mattress that can be placed underneath the patient, acting like a reverse air hockey table.
The result of this project was a single-patient use mattress where patients could be effortlessly slid from one surface to another, significantly reducing push/pull forces for caregivers and hospital staff. In 2023, SPH Medical returned to Rennacker Studio, wanting to create and market a reusable, washable, and extremely durable version of this same product.
The team at Rennacker Studio had the foresight to plan for this back when they built the design system for the disposable air transfer system. Once a product finds its success, it is only natural for any business to want to expand upon that success with another product that keeps customers coming back for more.
Originally, every disposable mattress was fitted with a sewn-in label that offered important safety information along with the various sizes and widths the mattress were offered in. All of this would remain the same for the reusable mattresses, however, there was one feature that would not remain the same.
Disposable mattress labels included an area to write in the patient’s name and the date the mattress was last changed. Given that this product was going to be reused and sanitized across multiple patients, it was important to remove this feature from the label to prevent caregivers from accidentally writing a patient’s name in Sharpie on a product designed to be used for multiple people.
The label also needed to provide facility staff with washing instructions to ensure every mattress was clean and safe to use for the next patient. Conveniently, removing the name and date section, created the perfect amount of space to drop in those product care instructions without the need to rework the entire label.
Now that the label was created and able to be sewn onto each mattress, SPH Medical requested the manufacturer to create two hand samples so the design team could get ahead of the production line to start bringing this product to market.
Once the hand samples arrived, Rennacker Studio produced a product photoshoot and effectively restaged the shots from the disposable mattress campaign to ensure consistency across the product line and formally establish a visual zeitgeist for how to photograph these products.
Again, the design team had already created a sales sheet for the disposable version of the air mattress, now they just had to update the photography and ensure the product details were specced according to the new features and benefits of the reusable mattress.
With a couple of images swapped and a few text changes, Rennacker Studio built upon a design system they established two years prior and expanded upon a product designed to give caregivers and hospital staff a safer and quicker way to transfer immobilized patients.
