By Justin Parkinson BBC News Online education staff

Bouncing babies: the inflatable cot is far lighter than wooden ones

A mother-of-three is promising to make family holidays a more lightweight affair.

As part of her studies at Wolverhampton University, Jo Bradford, 37, has invented an inflatable cot.

Easily foldable and lighter than its metal and wooden equivalents, Jo hopes it will revolutionise the market and make travel abroad easier.

Jo, an accounts assistant until she joined university in 1998, is now marketing the cot and has received more than 200 orders in her first week.

She said: "I remember going on holiday with the kids. Carrying a cot was a pain.

"It was no good for staying below the hand luggage weight limit on planes and it was too bulky."

Jo, who has three daughters aged seven, nine and 18, came up with the inflatable cot idea when carrying out a project for her degree course in computer-aided design.

Struggling

She said: "We had to design a product from scratch. It couldn't be anything that was already around, in one form or another.

"I went to my tutor with three or four ideas, but they were all turned down."

Among her other ideas were a tagging device for children, in case they got lost, and a tarpaulin dispenser.

In the end, inspiration came from within the family.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of bigger and better things Jo Bradford

Jo said: "I picked up my eldest daughter from a hotel she was working at. There was this lady struggling with a travel cot.

"She also had a all her luggage with her. It seemed like a real pain and it made me think.

"I looked to see what other cots were on the market, there was quite a choice of pushchairs, but cots all seemed to be very similar."

Jo, of Telford, Shropshire, did an access course in fine arts while she was on maternity leave with her two youngest daughters.

But she changed to computer-aided design while at university in the hope of getting a better-paid job.

For her project, the cot had to be tested to industry standards. Its plastic is strong enough to resist the attention of teething infants.

Jo was not the first person to patent the idea of an inflatable cot.

She said: "Some other people came up with them 30 years ago. But plastics technology has come on a long way since then.

"The old designs had to have separate bases and surrounds, which meant it was possible the baby could slip through. That seemed a bit dangerous."

Jo's cot was accepted as her final degree project and she gained a 2:1.

She and her husband Paul have started manufacturing the cot - called Holi-Doze - and are planning to release an inflatable bed-head for children.