We’ve been given the task to build a safety bed for a two year old child with special needs, ensuring secure and comfortable sleeping environment. Our goal is to create a bed that provides protection while also being easily maneuverable, light, and strong. We’ve worked closely to the family and therapist to ensure the child receives everything they need. This project is driven by a commitment to supporting the child’s unique needs while giving parents peace of mind.
Children with special needs often require a safe and secure sleeping environment to prevent injury and ensure restful sleep. Traditional beds may not provide adequate protection against falls, entrapment, or unintended exits, posing safety risks for both the child and the parents. A child with special needs requires a customized safety bed that offers a secure enclosure, proper ventilation, and easy access while maintaining comfort. The lack of an appropriate sleeping solution can lead to disrupted sleep, increased anxiety for parents, and potential harm to the child. Therefore, a specialized safety bed must be designed and built to address these concerns.
The parents and therapist has a few special requests to best suit their needs. The mattress must be easily accessible or removable to change the sheets. Safety mesh, similar to that of a bounce house, must be used to reduce the risk of injury for the child. Lastly, to keep the child distracted at night they requested a mount for their iPad and some type of toy.
In our research we discovered the Cubby Bed. The Cubby bed is an extremely expensive bed designed for children with special needs. We decided to make our base designs around this concept. Designing a frame meeting all of our requirements is simple. The difficult part we discovered was creating a mesh that’s safe and durable. We found that buying a bed tent that surrounds a mattress and connects to the frame would be the most ideal.
![Other Bed Tent]](https://techengineeringforkids.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Other-Bed-Tent.jpg)
Our first design goes for a simple and cheap bed. This design requires minimal manufacturing, replaceable parts, and light weight. The RIYDH bed tent appears to have mostly everything the parents requested including a charging port, safety mesh, and easy access to the mattress. We would secure the tent to the frame with strong Velcro or another temporary fastening device.
Wooden Frame Log Cabin Style. This design would have a wooden post on all four corners a wooden wall along two sides of it and mesh on the others. Mesh on the foot and header side of the bed would allow for the mattress to slide out to change the sheets easily. The wooden wall could have a window section cut out and a cut out for some sensory sliders/ toys that would not have any removable pieces. This would allow the child to play with them if she woke up in the night while eliminating the change of eating something or needing to be supervised. This mesh on the footer would also allow for the girl to watch shows from a projector on a wall outside of the bed. This design would have a boxed in top and bottom to make it very rigid but would likely be too heavy for wheels and not as easily movable. This design would be very robust. It would be padded so the child cannot get hurt, and it is strong enough that they would not break it. It would also be easy to manufacture and cost effective because of its wooden construction. The downsides would be that it could not be taken apart very easily and would be heavy.
This concept design is similar to concept one however, it has the use of PVC piping on the side to support the tent in case of unforeseen circumstances. We are replacing the rods that come with the tent with custom PVC tubes. This design requires a custom frame for the bed to securely fit the PVC, which we would make from steel. This concept is able to be disassembled, light weight, and extremely safe.
Based on our design matrix we chose to do concept 3. This design meets all the requirements received from the family while also being cost effective, safe, and very strong. Although this design requires a little bit of custom manufacturing it provides a much stronger shell in case of unseen scenarios.
The bed frame is made out of 1020 steel with .75″x 5.5″ wood slats on the bottom to support the mattress. To safely enclose the mattress we will use the RIYDH bed tent. This pre made tent has everything we need including safety mesh, charging cord holes, light reduction, and noise reduction. Instead of using the tubes that come with the tent to mount the mesh, we will use custom PVC. This PVC will be stronger in case of excessive pushing, pulling, etc.
Engineering Analysis 1: Determining the thickness of the wooden slats used in the frame of the bed using analytical methods. Given a healthy 200lb person stepping on the center of the board what is the factor of safety for several common board sizes. We chose the 1×6 because of while it had the lower factor of safety it provided the most efficiency and with the mattress above it should reach peak loads under normal circumstances.
Engineering Analysis 3: Using Finite element analysis we calculated the stress of the bracket hooks that will attach to the pvc tubes and hold the mesh panels in place. While the exact material properties are unknown, running the simulation with a similar material and then cross referencing the exact stress values gives us a good ballpark stress value. The Maximum von-mises stress was 25.07MPA while the average yield strength of the material is 40MPa. This should be satisfactory for the components intended purpose.
