Design of an Innovative Mattress to Improve Sleep Thermal Comfort Based on Sleep Positions

Recently, mattresses are designed and divided horizontally into several zones according to the main body segments under the static condition. However, different body segments have different thermal characteristics and sleeping postures change unconsciously during the night. Thus, the movements of the extremities should be taken into consideration in a bedding system design. With this in mind, the purposes of this study are: (1) to observe the changes of sleeping posture; and, (2) to develop an innovative mattress design based on the distributions of the body positions. A purposive sample of ten healthy participants (five males and five females) were selected to conduct the sleep monitoring in order to observe the dynamic and continuous features of their all-night sleeping postures. The images captured were then overlaid in order to acquire the distributions of the body positions on a mattress. The outcomes of sleep posture characteristics were used to provide a reference to conduct the mattress design to satisfy the needs of different body segments. Morphological analysis was used to find out the most suitable attributes for a mattress design. Finally, an innovative mattress design has been developed in this study. The proposed mattress has a four-layer sandwiched structure. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the effect of the mattress on thermal comfort with 10 participants and a questionnaire was used to evaluate their subjective feelings on thermal comfort.