A crowdfunding drive on Kickstarter has opened for the Bed Phrame Lift. The portable device helps wheelchair users reach tall hotel beds. Its name, PHRAME, stands for Portable Hotel Room Accessible Mattress Equalizer.
The lift was invented by Anthony Amorello, who is quadriplegic and uses a sliding board to move from his chair. The idea came from a 2010 stay at a Hawaii resort. Because the platform beds there were too high for a transfer, he and his wife spent two weeks sleeping on rollaway beds.
The device is an electric lift on four wheels, about the size of a rollaway cot. It weighs roughly 110 pounds. A guest backs the wheelchair onto its platform, which can rise 13 inches. With a remote, the user sets it a little above the mattress to get into bed, or a little below it to return to the chair.
Amorello’s point is simple. Hotels have no standard bed height, and every wheelchair is different too. Since the lift moves straight up and down, he says it can match almost any chair to almost any bed.
Hotels are the main market. The lift can be stored next to the extra cots and brought out when a guest who uses a wheelchair checks in. It was also designed to be light, easy to move and safe for staff to handle. Amorello also ran a study of his own. It found that people with limited mobility would travel more often if hotels offered such a product.
Before the campaign, the lift was still a prototype with a patent pending, and Amorello was refining the design. The trade publication LODGING Magazine later named the Bed Phrame Lift one of its innovators for 2017.
