Fuzzy and AHP approaches for designing a hospital bed: a case study in Bangladesh

Ergonomics in his recent revolution phase has emerged on diversified areas which pushed the authors to consider the major anthropometric considerations for designing a hospital bed for sensitive patients. In this paper, the authors tried to show some relationships among physical demands with anthropometric factors for normal hospital bed design in Bangladesh, where the concepts are relatively new and obvious. In this study, 35 patients and 35 doctors have given their opinion through a set of questionnaires. A total of 103 students from a public university in Bangladesh were targeted as the sample area for measuring anthropometric measurements. For prioritising among different design parameters, analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy logic techniques were used. Finally, at the end portion of this research work a linear regression analysis has been carried out to show the relationship of stature height with other anthropometric measurements related to normal hospital bed design.