Hospital Bed Manufacturing: From the Gatch Bed to ABB Robots

Hospital bed manufacturing starts with a steel frame, a mattress deck and four wheels. A modern bed adds motors, rails, sensors and a control panel, and every part has to survive years of washing and daily use. This post traces how the bed went from a plain iron frame to the adjustable Gatch bed of 1909 and on to push button models. It then looks at the welding, grinding and assembly work behind a bed today, and at where ABB robots could fit into that work.

A hospital bed with a hand control in an emergency room. Photo: Tiia Monto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From iron frames to the Gatch bed and the push button

Early hospital wards were rows of fixed iron framed beds. Beds with adjustable side rails first appeared in Britain between 1815 and 1825, and in 1874 Andrew Wuest and Son of Cincinnati, Ohio, patented a mattress frame with a hinged head that could be raised. A photograph of a ward at Safad, taken in 1940, still shows the older style: plain iron frames lined up in rows. Nurses lifted and turned patients by hand, since the bed could not do it for them.

A ward in the hospital at Safad, photographed in 1940, with rows of iron framed beds. Photo: Matson Collection, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1909 Willis Dew Gatch, a surgery department chair at Indiana University School of Medicine, designed the modern three segment adjustable bed, known as the Gatch bed. The deck could be raised at the head and bent at the knees, so a patient could sit up without help. Henry Ford later added a crank mechanism. The raised head position, called Fowler's position, is used for feeding patients and sometimes to ease breathing. Beds of this period were built from steel tube and sheet, which meant a lot of cutting, bending and welding.

A metal hospital bed with a raised back section, from the 1940s. Photo: unknown / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Motors came next. The push button hospital bed was invented in 1945, and its original design even included a built in toilet to do away with the bedpan. Cranks gave way to electric drives, so each bed needed a motor, wiring and a hand control. Side rails changed too. The US Food and Drug Administration later set safety guidelines after more than 300 entrapment deaths in the United States between 1985 and 2004. Every safety rule added parts, and every part added a step on the assembly line.

The base and controls of a Hill-Rom hospital bed. Photo: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What a hospital bed plant looks like now

Today's beds have lockable wheels, alternating pressure mattresses, bed exit alarms and five function ICU frames. TiMOTION, founded in 2006, makes linear actuators for medical, furniture and industrial uses, and it lists on Taiwan's emerging stock board on 21 October. A headline from 19 October says its chairman, Tseng Kuan-shu, expects industrial robots to come next year. I have only seen the headline, but it suggests that makers of bed parts are looking at robots too. A market report in October projects smart hospital beds at US$4.77 billion by 2033.

A modern electric hospital bed in a patient room. Photo: Fatiens / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A steel bed frame is a welding job. ABB arc welding robots are often paired with a positioner, which tilts and rotates heavy parts so the torch can reach every joint. On a bed frame that keeps welds consistent from the first unit to the thousandth. Hospital beds need that consistency, because frames carry patients and rails and are checked against load and safety tests. I did not find a source naming a bed maker that uses ABB welding robots, so this describes a likely fit and not a customer story. For a plant, the point of the positioner is simple: the welder or robot works on a part that is already in the best position.

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Smaller shops can start with a cobot. ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package puts a GoFa arm and a torch on a welding table, and ABB's Easy Teach Device lets a welder guide the torch by hand to teach the path. The cobot then repeats it. That suits a bed maker with many frame variants and short runs, where a person welds the one-off parts and the robot takes the repeat seams. Programs for cells like this are usually built and checked in RobotStudio before the cell is installed.

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Hospital beds, robots and the open problems

The next beds will do more. Specialist designs such as air fluidised beds, which float a patient on warm air, already exist for burns and pressure injuries. Add exit alarms and sensors, and the frame becomes a small medical device with software. That creates a factory problem: more electronics means more test steps and more cables to route. Robots handle repeat steps well, such as picking and placing parts or tending a test station, but cable harnesses and varied options are still hard to automate, and the cost of a cell has to be weighed against short production runs.

An air fluidised bed at the University Hospital in Lubeck, 2019. Photo: Llydia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Finishing is another job a robot can take. An ABB IRB 6700 grinds steel parts in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer, and a large arm like it could deburr and polish bed frames, rails and welded corners that touch patients and cleaning cloths. Smooth welds are also easier to wash, which matters in a room that is cleaned between patients. Paint comes after that, which our post on powder coating robots covers in detail. Again, no source I found puts this exact cell in a bed plant, so I treat it as a possibility.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

The bed does not stop at the factory door. Hospitals move beds with porters, and our post on hospital bed transport robots looks at how ABB mobile robots could take over some of that. Inside the plant, the open problems are the ones other industries face: the cost of a cell, safety around moving arms, and finding people who can program and maintain them. Hospitals buy beds in large numbers and keep them for years, so a plant that welds, finishes and tests every frame the same way has a real advantage over one that relies on hand skill alone.

A hospital bed on wheels standing in a corridor. Photo: Peachyeung316 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com