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Adaptive lighting for grandpa!
Today, the major source of light in most of our apartments and offices, like it or not, constitutes of artificial lights and not natural lights! And it is no secret that artificial light affects us in subtle ways; at its best, ambient lighting can relax, soothe or excite, but used poorly it can drain us of energy and disrupt sleep. Ever thought about a lighting system that could adapt automatically to meet our individual needs? According to a report published in ICT Results of the European Commission Website, a team of European researchers say the result would be an improvement in the general wellbeing of anybody who spends long periods in artificially lit buildings, particularly the elderly and the infirm, but also factory and office workers. "Studies have shown that the quality and type of lighting can have a significant impact on our health and comfort," explains Edith Maier, a researcher at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (FHV) in Austria. Maier coordinated the EU-funded Aladin project which brought together academic and industrial partners from Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Romania to develop an innovative ambient lighting system that adapts intelligently to individual needs and wishes. The system uses information from biosensors worn by the occupants of a room or building to determine what users are doing and then changes the lighting accordingly. The researchers' goal is to use the technology to improve the wellbeing of the elderly, people suffering from age-related illnesses and people with reduced mobility, many of whom spend a lot of time confined indoors. "Poor lighting can accentuate existing vision problems and reading difficulties among the elderly, it can cause depression and disrupt sleep cycles," Maier says. "By automatically adapting the lighting in a room to what people are doing, many of these psychological and physiological problems can be reduced." Most adaptive ambient lighting systems in use today do not take individual needs and activities into account. They rely instead on a preset-time cycle to brighten and dim during certain periods of the day. In contrast, the Aladin system uses data from sensors in a glove worn by users to measure their heart rate and skin conductance response the electrical resistance of the skin which goes up during periods of activity and down while at rest. Fed wirelessly into a control system, the bio-data lets the system know automatically when to switch between a brightly lit "active setting" and a more subdued relaxation mode. More than a hundred people participated in a series of lab and field tests conducted in Austria, Italy and Germany. The trials showed that elderly people quickly learnt how to use the system and, over the course of three months, experienced improvements in their general wellbeing, including less trouble reading and less disturbed sleep patterns. Source: ICT Results (European Commission Website)
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