"There has been more than one time that we've seen these things just fail," says Holmes.

The first bariatric bed that Holmes found while working on the patient care products side of the industry came from a Canadian manufacturer.


"We took it in, we got the patient up in the lift and then we lowered this 800-pound man onto a 1,000 pound frame," says Holmes. "And the bed just slowly sunk to the floor."




As more manufacturers are entering the market now, Holmes says facilities should be cautious about the products they choose to purchase.

"It can be a dangerous place now," he says. "You have to make sure that you're getting someone who knows what bariatrics are and make sure that you're working with a company that isn't just making a big chair. There seems to be a great deal of that now."

Manufacturers have free reign in this sector of the industry because no bariatric-specific testing or manufacturing standards exist for bariatric furniture. But the Franklin Furniture Institute at the Mississippi State University is planning to change that. Under the wing of the university's Forest and Wildlife Research Center, a team of researchers is working on design and testing guidelines for bariatric furniture.

"When we got to looking at the market, we didn't find a whole lot of standards for number one, residential furniture and number two, bariatric furniture," says Bill Martin, the institute's director. "The idea was to look at some research on what a design for a chair for a bariatric person would look like and then come up with a standard that manufacturers would use to meet the criteria to all phases of a chair," he says.

Martin explains that the two testing standards for regular furniture - the shock and static load tests - are not enough for bariatrics because of the dynamic loads that must be taken into consideration: there are pressures when people sit down, lean back and rely on the arm rests to get up or down.

"What we found is that a lot of manufacturers just take their current chair and make it wider and deeper and then they go with it," says Martin. "That's not necessarily a correct design."

The researchers have designed a prototype frame that captures live data on seating loads to measure the human impact on the chair.

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