Problem:

The typical elderly person wakes up to use the restroom multiple times a night so they have to bend over multiple times as well. This takes a toll on their body. It also makes them susceptible to injury by causing them to lose their balance. They also have to deal with the excess fabric which can get in the way and cause the nightgown to get soiled. All of these nuisances are both dangerous and annoying for the user.

Solution:

Our design has an integrated pulley system that lifts up the bottom of the nightgown and is held up by magnets. This function eliminates a lot of the issues faced by the elderly with mobility issues, specifically back, shoulder, knee, and hip pain.

The user can also use one hand to pull down both pulls. They can connect them together and pull down to hold them in place with the magnet in the middle of the base of the nightgown.

This mockup had to straps that would pull up the nightgown and then put on the shoulders to hold it up. This didn’t work because of the obvious should impingement and mobility issues we were trying to design for.

On the same garment we made a pulley system using rope that the user would pull down. Then they would bring up the rest of the nightgown. This still didn’t solve the problem of bending over. Also the rope we used caused too much friction which didn’t work for the design.

In the middle of the nightgown there was a band with two handles to pull up the nightgown. This didn’t allow the user to pull it up all the way. They would still have to grab all the fabric and hold it themselves.

This mockup was where the design started to take shape. We found fishing line to use in the pulley system instead of rope or ribbon. It was almost friction-less when pulling down the pulls. Then they attached at the bottom to magnets that held them in place.

We tried having the nightgown have an open front just to see if the pulley system would still work. It did work, however we received feedback from the elderly people we talked to that they didn’t like having open gowns. It still had the problem of having to bend over to button the bottom button or closure.

We made this mockup out of a store bought nightgown. We added three magnets at the bottom of the nightgown. One for each pull, and then one in the middle for someone to pull it down with one hand.

We brought our prototype to an independent living home for the elderly to get some feedback on our design. They liked our concept and one lady wanted to buy it on the spot. The key takeaways were they wanted warm materials and a higher collar, but the biggest takeaway was that they were appreciative of our efforts in coming in and talking to them.

We spoke with the head of the occupational therapist department at SJSU to get feedback on our design. She validated our idea for the nightgown, but also gave us feedback on how to make the bottom of the nightgown better. We worked on the cut of the back and how it would look when pulled up. We wanted to make room for different shapes and sizes as well as being able come up fully when using the restroom.

We initially started to think about how we were going to attach the magnets to the nightgown and we decided that casting them inside silicone would be the best option. Then to attach we looked at a variety of buttons for reference. We Liked how the shank button hid the stitches and kept a clean face which would be perfect for our magnets. We took proper measurements and jumped into CAD to make a mold.