Abstract
Introduction: Sleep surfaces must adapt to individual somatotypic features to maintain a comfortable, convenient and healthy sleep, preventing diseases and injuries. Individually determining the most adequate rest surface can often be a complex and subjective question.
Objectives: To design and validate an automatic multimodal somatotype determination model to automatically recommend an individually designed mattress-topper-pillow combination.
Methods: Design and validation of an automated prescription model for an individualised sleep system is performed through a single-image 2 D–3 D analysis and body pressure distribution, to objectively determine optimal individual sleep surfaces combining five different mattress densities, three different toppers and three cervical pillows.
Results: A final study (n = 151) and re-analysis (n = 117) defined and validated the model, showing high correlations between calculated and real data (>85% in height and body circumferences, 89.9% in weight, 80.4% in body mass index and more than 70% in morphotype categorisation).
Conclusions: Somatotype determination model can accurately prescribe an individualised sleep solution. This can be useful for healthy people and for health centres that need to adapt sleep surfaces to people with special needs. Next steps will increase model’s accuracy and analise, if this prescribed individualised sleep solution can improve sleep quantity and quality; additionally, future studies will adapt the model to mattresses with technological improvements, tailor-made production and will define interfaces for people with special needs.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Dormity® for its collaboration in all the phases of the project, and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Research Park (Parc de Recerca de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, PRUAB) for their coordination tasks.
Disclosure statement
This work shows the design and validity of an automatic human body morphotype determination based on a 2 D–3 D digital camera and a pressure measuring surface that can be used to prescribe, in this case, an individualised sleep solution (combination of mattress, topper and cervical pillow). This automatic morphotype determination model can be used when is difficult or inapropriate to manually obtain the exact body measurements, as in a public environment or when individual conditions make it impossible to obtain them (impaired persons as in emergency rooms or in bed patients). This model will also be useful when users are not clear on deciding which bed surfaces are the most comfortable, or to determine the most appropriate sleep surface for patients with body deformities or cognitive impairment.