Liko Brand Guidelines: The Luleå Patient-Lift Maker That Passed From Hill-Rom to Baxter

A patient-lift maker in Sweden’s far north.

Liko is a Swedish maker of patient lifts. English Wikipedia describes Liko AB as a manufacturer of patient lifting equipment based in Luleå, in the far north of Sweden, and dates its establishment to 1979. Swedish Wikipedia names the founder as Gunnar Liljedahl and places the head office in Alvik, a village outside Luleå in the county of Norrbotten. It adds that the company took an active part in the life of the village, including a football pitch and a restaurant.

The range was narrow from the start, and both Wikipedia articles describe it in the same terms: mobile and stationary, or overhead, patient lifts, with the lifting slings and other accessories that go with them, made for customers in the care sector. Swedish Wikipedia says most of what Liko made was sold outside Sweden, chiefly in Europe, North America and Oceania; the English article lists North America, Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region as its largest markets.

In October 2008 Liko was bought by Hill-Rom, the American medical technology group then based in Batesville, Indiana, Swedish Wikipedia says. According to the same article, the purchase made the Alvik head office Hill-Rom’s global centre of knowledge for lifting and moving patients, and a broader, complementary product range was the reason given for the deal: with Liko, Hill-Rom could offer lifts and slings alongside the beds, mattresses and furniture it already sold for the patient’s room.

From Hill-Rom to Baxter.

Under Hill-Rom, Liko became one of several names the group carried. English Wikipedia lists it, with Welch Allyn and Trumpf Medical among others, as one of the acquired names under which the group developed and made equipment, and records that Hill-Rom rebranded itself as Hillrom, written as one word, in 2019. The same article says Hill-Rom had itself been part of Hillenbrand Industries until 2008, when Hillenbrand split off its medical equipment division as a separate company, and that the group’s headquarters later moved to Chicago, Illinois.

Ownership changed again two years later. Baxter International announced in September 2021 that it would acquire Hillrom, and English Wikipedia says the acquisition was completed in December 2021. Liko has been part of Baxter since then. The Swedish edition of Baxter’s European site for these products presents them as Hillrom, Welch Allyn and Liko solutions, now from Baxter.

On Baxter’s European pages the range is organised by task. Overhead systems include the LikoGuard lift, offered in L and XL versions, and the Likorall family, with models numbered 242, 243 and 250 and a Room-to-Room option for carrying a patient from one room to the next along the rail. Floor-based mobile lifts, for rooms without a ceiling rail, include the Golvo 9000, the Viking in M, L and XL sizes, the Uno M for long-term care and home care, and the Sabina II sit-to-stand lift.

Slings make up the third part of the range. Baxter groups them by job rather than by model: lifting a person lying flat, repositioning and turning with the Repo Sheet, moving from bed to chair, going to and from the toilet, bath, shower or pool, walking practice, lifting from the floor and moving a person out of a vehicle. A lifting accessory called MultiStrap holds an arm or a leg or helps turn a patient, and single-patient-use versions of slings, sheets and straps are offered as well.

Design and documentation.

Hospital bed and patient-handling companies present themselves mainly through brochures, websites and trade-fair stands. A common picture is a bright ward room: a bed raised to working height, the side rails up, a bedside cabinet in a pale wood decor and a window letting in daylight. Care-home ranges are shown differently, with warmer colours, wood-look panels and beds styled to look less like hospital equipment and more like bedroom furniture.

Patient-handling makers work with a different set of images. Ceiling lifts are photographed on rails running over a care bed, mobile hoists and slings beside a wheelchair, and transfer aids in narrow bathrooms. People are almost always present: a carer and a patient or resident, usually models in staged scenes, with the equipment placed at the centre of the frame and the room kept calm and uncluttered.

Trade fairs are the other stage. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and the Dubai health fair long known as Arab Health draw bed and lift makers from Europe, Asia and North America, and many of them build furnished room sets on their stands so that buyers can walk round a bed, try the controls and see a lift in use. Several companies also keep showrooms at their headquarters for the same purpose.

Many of these companies are family-owned or have passed through several owners, and some of the oldest began as makers of wire mattresses, iron beds or orthopaedic parts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made, and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A short name that outlived its independence.

Liko is a short name, four letters and two syllables, and it has lasted through two changes of owner. As of November 2026 the old liko.com and liko.se web addresses forward to Hillrom and Baxter pages rather than to a separate Liko site, and the name lives on mainly in the products themselves.

That shows most clearly in the naming. The overhead lifts carry the Liko name inside the product name, as in LikoGuard and Likorall, while the mobile lifts use single short words, such as Golvo, Viking, Uno and Sabina, each followed by a size letter or a model number. The slings are grouped on those pages by the task they serve. For anyone building a visual system for a range like this, the lesson is in that structure: a parent name, a family prefix and plain functional labels, each doing one job.

The setting matters too. These are products bought by hospitals, care homes and home-care services, described on their owner’s pages in sober, technical language. A palette for them works best when it is calm, legible and easy to reproduce across manuals, labels and product pages.

For a design guide, Liko shows how a regional Swedish maker’s name can carry on as a product brand under two successive American owners. Compare Baxter, which has owned Liko through Hillrom since December 2021, and Handicare, another mobility-aids name with Nordic roots that passed to a new owner. For this guide we use a northern blue, birch white and a lingonberry red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Liko’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.