Lifts are an important and established piece of equipment in caring for customers in their homes, but updates and improvements in the space are often overlooked. HomeCare spoke with lift manufacturers about some of the latest innovations that can change users' lives.
All in the Details
Med-Mizer, a 21-year-old veteran-founded company, is always aiming to make its equipment better for its customers. When it makes tweaks and small adjustments to its Sit-To-Stand Lift and Patient Lift line, Med-Mizer usually sees that big changes are all in the small details.
Brian Roth, vice president of sales and marketing at Med-Mizer, said that when the company asked users about comfort, most feedback mentioned a little foam block that surrounds the patients' shin and knee area in the process of helping them stand.
Roth explained Med-Mizer was able to use pressure redistribution strapping technology already in use in its Flex Chair Line to adjust the knee and shin plate, and also added a foam pad for additional comfort.
“When we brought all of our customers in and we had all the competitive lifts, they all said how much more comfortable our lift line was due to that knee and shin plate,” Roth said.
An additional detail that Med-Mizer added to enhance user comfort is a soft foam pad on the footplate of the Sit-To-Stand Lift. Roth said most lifts will have a metal plate footplate covered in sandpaper or contact paper.
“At night when a loved one has to go to the bathroom, you don’t have time to try to put their shoes on or socks on, you’re just putting their feet on that, causing discomfort,” he said. “So with ours, we put a nice soft foam pad to help improve that.”
Roth said many people believe that, like a wheel, there is no way to truly reinvent a lift, so many opt for a cheaper product instead of considering what quality innovation can do to increase their quality of life. This has created a trend in the industry where companies are trying to make lifts at the lowest price possible.
“There’s a lot more low-cost entrants into this space,” Roth said. “Really, it feels like it’s more of a race to who can have the cheapest price versus who can have the best outcome for that individual … and I would say that’s what we’re trying and striving to be different from.”
Currently, Med-Mizer Patient Lifts come in 600- and 1,000-pound options, but Roth said they plan on releasing a smaller 450-pound Patient Lift within a few months.
“We’ve gotten such a request in the homecare environment to have smaller footprint lifts,” he said. “We’re getting closer to launching, doing some final testing underway.”
Med-Mizer is getting requests for larger-size bariatric Sit-To-Stand lifts as well. Currently, the Sit-To-Stand Lift has a maximum capacity of 500 pounds. Roth said the company plans to put some focus on that in terms of product development but has no timeline of when bariatric lifts would hit the market.
Everyone Deserves Independence
UpLyft aims to fill a gap in the lift market by creating the first seated self-transfer and assisted transfer system for people with limited mobility.
Anton Simson created the first UpLyft prototype in 2016 in his garage after his friend’s son was in a bicycle accident that left him a paraplegic—and his wife became his caregiver. She struggled to transfer him in and out of bed even with standard transfer methods, so Simson, a triple-degree aerospace engineer from MIT, set out on a mission to make a product that would help with mobility challenges. After nine prototypes and clearance from the Food and Drug Administration, UpLyft officially hit the market for private homes in early 2022.
Bria d’Amours, UpLyft’s vice president of marketing and business development, said business has been great since that launch two years ago.
“We sold out of our first run units and are in the process of deploying our second run,” she said. “We were pleasantly surprised.”
The typical UpLyft consumers are individuals in private homes with limited mobility, mainly wheelchair users. D’Amours said 60% to 70% of users in private homes want UpLyft for self-transfer, but the other 30% to 40% have a caregiver who can’t lift the person out of bed or transfer them with other methods currently available such as slings and transfer boards that require physical lifting.
“So those are the two primary people we're looking at on the private home side,” d’Amours said. “And then we also have a whole separate market, which is the health care institutions—hospitals, physical therapy, clinics, nursing homes, assisted living facilities. So, any type of facility where you have a large population of people with limited mobility.”
D’Amours said one customer had not gotten out of bed in eight years because his wife couldn’t lift him and was finally able to thanks to UpLyft. Now he gets out of bed every week.
Additionally, people who are now able to self-transfer no longer need caregivers, or need them for shorter periods, providing much-needed independence many with limited mobility are forced to give up.
“The other big response that we get on the assisted transfer side of things is that caregivers are no longer hurting themselves trying to transfer people or they're actually able to do it now…with UpLyft because it doesn't require any physical force,” d’Amours said. “It’s been life-changing for some of these people really.”
She said the company is focused on reducing caretaker injuries and also ameliorating staff shortages by reducing the number of nurses or caregivers it takes to transfer a patient from as many as four to one or two. Users can transfer from their bed to their wheelchair in less than two minutes, an impressive number when most assisted transfer systems can take upwards of 10 to 40 minutes. Currently, UpLyft can transfer someone up to 300 pounds, and an extra-wide prototype that can serve people in the 300 to 400-pound weight range is in development.
D’Amours said down the line they would love to incorporate software that connects to an app for voice activation to make the self-transfer feature even more accessible and allow community through connectivity online.
