Case Study: Healthcare Mattresses

Most don’t think of all the work that goes into the mattress they sleep on every night, but for Michel Marynissen, Managing Director of Medical Mattress Care (MMC), located in Lokeren, Belgium, it’s his primary concern. MMC specializes in manufacturing beds, bedding, and seating for hospitals and healthcare facilities.

In order to get a restorative sleep, patients need MMC mattresses to be comfortable, safe, and hygienic.

“We want to push the usual sterile look and feel of nursing beds to the back seat in favour of more comfortable surroundings and pleasant, high-quality materials while still giving top priority to safety, hygiene and, of course, cost-efficient cleaning and handling.

While some may consider “comfortable” to be a relative term, one component of comfort is compression or how a mattress reacts when pressure, like the weight of a person, is applied to it. Are permanent indentations left behind or does the mattress return to its original shape? This is an especially important concern for bedridden patients and bedsore prevention.

MMC puts its products through rigorous testing for a variety of factors, including compression set, to ensure their products are of the highest quality and meet specific ISO standards. For testing the compression set of the soft-elastic polymer foams that make up their mattresses, MMC uses a Memmert UNB200 universal heating oven. After compressing a foam by 50%, they heat it up in their Memmert oven to 70°C for nearly an entire day. Once it’s been in the oven for 22 hours, they  take it out and allow it to cool to room temperature. At that point, the foam’s height is measured to determine how compressed the foam remained. A high quality mattress has a compression set of 4-5%.

Medical Mattress Care chose their Memmert oven for its ease of use and precise temperature controls. To learn more about them and how they use their Memmert, read the full case study AtmoSAFE.