Aging often comes along with numerous physical hurdles that you may face along the way. Many aging people have to rely on devices and machines to help make daily life easier again.
However, some of these products may cause unintentional harm, injury or even death due to defects in the design.
How product recalls work
The Consumer Product Safety Commission surveys numerous products and their designs to ensure product safety. They often catch issues such as 2021’s recall of Carex adult portable bed rails.
These rails are intended to help adults get out of bed if they struggled to do so, which many older or injured people do. In the case of the 2021’s recall, however, three people ended up dead due to product design issues.
Due to the design of the rail attachment, it was possible for the people in bed to end up trapped between the rail and bed, or within the bed rail itself. This created a risk of asphyxiation, which took the three aforementioned lives.
Looking into negligent product design
This issue comes from using an add-on product with something that was not initially designed for the intended purpose of said product. In short, the beds were not built with a bed rail in mind, leaving the user open to damages caused by improper installation.
This counts as a negligent product design. The product must get used with other products that are not designed for use with it. This leads to potential problems like the aforementioned improper installation, and it is a fatal flaw baked into the product’s very design.