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TRINITY - As the young woman lounged on the bed, the large flat-screen monitor beside her lit up violently - valleys of bright color appearing on the deep blue read-out.

"This is a 14-year-old bed," said Alan Letton. "We'll take five readings of two to three minutes each, and then average them."

The whole thing took no time at all, the thin pad beneath her alive with 10,000 sensors taking measurements - pressure points, stress on capillaries, millimeters of mercury. It gets complicated. Suffice to say: on this mattress, she'd toss and turn. She'd wake up tired and sore. And that won't do. Not at Sealy, the world's largest manufacturer of mattresses.

Which is why Letton, chief science officer for the company, was on hand last week to officially open the Dr. Robert G. and Beverly Addison Center of Excellence at its corporate headquarters in Trinity.

Think of it as the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of American bedding - a four-station, state-of-the-art pressure mapping laboratory where Sealy will work with orthopedic surgeons, clinicians, researchers and designers to merge furniture and sleep science. Its goal: to understand the way humans sleep and create bedding to help them do it better.

Letton said that's been the mission at Sealy since the 1950s, when Dr. Robert G. Addison's work with mattresses and lumbar support led the company to shift focus, specializing in supportive mattresses and eventually creating its wildly successful Sealy Posturpedic mattresses.

"But even today there are a lot of people who never think about their bed," said Phillip Dobbs, vice president of marketing for Sealy. "There are plenty of people who have such trouble sleeping that they'll go to their doctor and ask for a pill, but they still don't think about what they're sleeping on."

Which is why Sealy formed its Orthopedic Advisory Board in 2006 - a group of medical specialists to help guide the company's designs. Members of the board were on hand for the lab's opening, watching as demonstration screens took readings and ran them against the more than 3,000 bed profiles in the lab has on file.

"We expect to start educating the public about sleep science and how it makes a difference to their lives and their beds," Letton said. "This lab is going to help us do that, along with our marketing department. The expectation is that this center will help us keep creating better products and through them and education, we can help America sleep better."

Contact Joe Killian at 883-4422, Ext. 228, or joe.killian@news-record.com