A study led by researchers at the Brown University School of Public Health found that using tuned LED lighting cut in half the number of sleep disturbances among older residents in long-term care. By installing interior lighting fixtures that change color and intensity over the course of the day and night, sleep disturbances experienced by residents in one California nursing home were improved without involving prescribing sleeping pills. (Image: Brown University) Rosa Baier, an associate professor at the Brown University, led a team of seven researchers who studie...

A new study reveals how outdoor artificial lighting at night links with sleep and mental disorder of adolescents. Researchers of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that teenagers who live in areas that have high levels of artificial light at night tend to get less sleep and are more likely to have a mood disorder comparing to teens who live in areas with low levels of night-time light. The research, titled “Association of Outdoor Artificial Light at Night with Mental Disorders and Sleep Patterns among US Adolescents,” was based on a cro...

Study Shows the Impacts of Lighting in Our Daily Life Many researches have indicated that lighting plays a critical role for human wellbeing and can significantly affect our productivity. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute published a study in 2018*, demonstrating that circadian-effective lighting installed in office buildings can help workers to reduce sleepiness and increase alertness and energy. “Circadian-effective” lighting describes light source delivering effective photic stimulus that suppress melatonin, which often re...

The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is investigating the impacts of working from home or quarantining indoors due to the COVID-19 pandemic on individual daily light exposures. The results showed that indoor and outdoor light exposure significantly impacted people’s sleep quality and psychological health. LRC conducted a survey on people who had been staying home due to the pandemic in May 2020. The survey collected 600 effective data and found that daily indoor light exposure and time spent outside had a major impact on all sur...

In 2020, people all around the globe are living in ways that we would never have thought because of COVID-19 pandemic. Majority of the world population has spent most of their time at home with lockdown policies and to avoid infection in the past few months. Even now that several areas have lifted up the restriction, people’s lifestyle is likely to change forever. Lighting applications, which highly related to our daily life, reflect the changes of people’s behaviors. LEDinside is thus seeing some rising trends in the lighting industry in response to the impact of ...

BIOS Lighting and TrueLight announced their new strategic partnership to advance circadian lighting applications and bring the health benefits of natural sunlight indoors. The new dimmable TrueLight Circadia bulb uses patented BIOS SkyBlue Technology to pinpoint key photoreceptors that signal circadian responses. During the daytime, the TrueLight Circadia bulb infuses the critical sky-blue region (near 490nm), which helps improve alertness, mood and performance. Dimming the bulb after the sun goes down removes daytime photoreceptors and sends nighttime signals to he...

Last week, Samsung announced that it is supporting five startups created by Samsung employees under the C-Lab Inside in-house incubation program. One of the new startups, SunnyFive, builds a window look lighting device delivering artificial sunlight. (Image: Samsung) According to Samsung, the window-shaped lighting created by SunnyFive produces full spectrum of light which is similar to natural light, simulating lighting situation including dawn, sunrise, sunset and dusk. Samsung also highlighted that this window-like lighting device can help users synthesize vitamin D...

People are getting more aware of how natural lighting affects the body as well as the psychological feelings. Lighting design and LED technology also address how the artificial light source can mimic the light in the nature. But how do we measure the “naturalness” of light? Bridgelux introduced a new metric to quantify the naturalness. Bridgelux announced that it has developed a new metric to enable objective comparison of light sources to natural light, since standard lighting quality metrics such as CRI and TM-30 do not fully address the naturalness. The LED...

Signify launched its new lighting product based on the concept of Human Centric Lighting, NatureConnect, which is built on proven biophilic design principles, usint elements of nature in interior spaces to create healthy, engaging and inspiring environments.   (Image: Signify) It is suggested from several researches that exposure to the right amount of light during the day, as well as the colors and dynamics from nature helps to improve people’s physical and psychological wellbeing. But the modern life style often leads to lack access to enough daylight, resulting...

A new study conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP) in Germany showed that full spectrum LED products deliver better visual comfort compared to standard LED products. Full spectrum LEDs are usually categorized as those emitting light similar in composition to natural sunlight. The soon-to-be published Fraunhofer IBP study incorporated a technical comparison of the LED spectra to daylight spectra, a literature review addressing the effect of light spectra on humans, and a psychological study with 83 persons in an office setting. Each par...

Environmental scientists at IGB, The Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, the research institute in Germany, found that artificial lighting at night affects melatonin reproduction in fishes. It is widely acknowledged that melatonin plays a critical role in regulating circadian rhythm of human bodies. And a research team now proved that lighting also suppresses production of melatonin in fishes. The team of IGB researchers investigated melatonin production in European perch and showed that light pollution, like nighttime urban sky glow, is bright...

Samsung Electronics unveiled its first "human-centric" LED packages, collectively known as LM302N. Engineered with carefully created light spectra, the LM302N family helps human bodies adjust melatonin levels indoors, making people feel more energetic or relaxed depending on their daily life patterns. “The benefits of using Samsung's LM302N reach beyond the basic lighting function of visual recognition, by improving the non-visual biological effects of lighting on people,” said Un Soo Kim, senior vice president of LED Business Team at Sa...

In Germany, a major supermarket chain owner is experimenting with new LED technologies that move beyond straightforward product illumination. An EDEKA store installed lights using ground-breaking Vitasolis™ LEDs from Nichia. Vitasolis™ offers a unique color spectrum that recreates the effect of natural light on people. Keen to find out what impact these LEDs can have on shopper behavior and, potentially, what products they buy, the store owner has teamed up with Dr. Enrique Strelow, Head of Shopper Communication at Ferrero, to conduct a scientific tria...

Human centric lighting and circadian lighting applications have become popular as people are getting more aware of the effect of lighting on our physical and psychological condition. To further understand the connection between lighting and people’s wellbeing, a new study found a cell in the retina which create the effect of light on human. Researchers at the University of Washington Health Sciences (UW Medicine) identifies a cell in the retina, which plays an important role in signaling our brain centers that regulate circadian rhythms, boost alertness, help memory and co...

Researchers at The University of Manchester in the UK discovered that blue light may not be as disruptive to our sleep patterns as originally thought. According to the team, using dim, cooler, lights in the evening and bright warmer lights in the day may be more beneficial to our health. The scientists claimed that twilight is both dimmer and bluer than daylight and the body clock uses both of those features to determine the appropriate times to be asleep and awake. In the research on mice, the team used a specially designed lighting whose color can be adjusted without changin...

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) together with Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève) developed a wearable sensor that measures how much light an individual is exposed to along with the spectral resolution of that light. The wearable sensor, named “Spectrace,” can detect the amount of light one person receives by being put around the neck like a pair of headphones or attached to an item of clothing with a magnetic pin. (Image: EPFL) Scientists have taken a growing interest in how a shortage ...

Researcher at the Lighting Research Center (LRC) found that tailored lighting intervention can significantly help Alzheimer patients to improve sleep quality, and reduce depressive symptoms and agitation behavior. In addition to memory loss, people diagnosed with Alzheimer disease also suffered from sleep disturbances, depression, and agitation. Dr. Mariana Figueiro, the Professor and Director at LRC, has been investigating how lighting intervention can lessen the impact of these symptoms in older adults living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADR...

Lighting Research Center (LRC) continues to conduct studies to learn how light impacts alertness during the day and sleep quality at night in daytime office workers. In its latest press release, LRC revealed that using blue light in the morning and red light in the afternoon helps office to increase energy. The study field tested a novel luminaire developed by the LRC to promote circadian entrainment and alertness in the office environment. 19 participants from three U.S. Department of State office buildings in Washington, D.C., completed the 3-week study. During ...

Acuity Brands announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with CIRCADIAN ZircLight. This business partnership includes licensing of CIRCADIAN ZircLight intellectual property, and a collaboration intended to accelerate commercialization within North America of CIRCADIAN’s Zirc™ branded technology through Acuity Brands’ portfolio of indoor luminaires. (Image: Pixabay) Over the past five years, CIRCADIAN ZircLight has created evidence-based specifications for workplace lighting and developed specialized ...

Casambi, the expert in wireless lighting controls based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), has teamed up with Seoul Semiconductor to provide lighting designers with precision control of LED lights that match the spectrum of sunlight. The development puts true human centric lighting in the hands of designers for the first time. Casambi’s wireless control technology can now be used with Seoul Semiconductor’s innovative SunLike Series LEDs, whose spectra match to real sunlight, to realize human centric lighting. “Human-centric lighting” describes...

LEDinside observes that GILE 2019, which concluded this week, attracted a larger crowd of attendees than before, with more areas of applications for everyone’s perusal. Health lighting, horticulture lighting and other niche applications have become mainstreams to meet the rocketing demands of the market, appearing on the exhibits of several large companies. Also, the future development and technology upgrades of lighting became the focus of many seminars as they sought to address the deployment of IoT and 5G. Connected Lighting Merges with Infrastructure and Marches...

BIOS Lighting, a LED lighting provider specialized in biological applications, announced that it has received Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Verification, confirming its solutions are designed for circadian health, wellness and productivity. BIOS Lighting has developed lighting solutions infused with its proprietary SkyBlue® technology which enables a wavelength spectrum of 490nm that reflects the peak sensitivity of melanopsin, a photopigment dedicated to circadian health. The SkyBlue lighting solution has officially passed UL Verification for Blue Spectru...

Seoul Semiconductor’s SunLike Series natural spectrum LEDs were identified as a key light source for promoting human well-being, based on the results of a recent comprehensive sleep study conducted by scientists at the University of Basel. In collaboration with Toshiba Material’s TRI-R spectrum technology, Seoul Semiconductor developed SunLike Series natural spectrum LEDs in 2017, which is the first LED light source to closely match the spectrum of natural sunlight. (Image: Seoul Semiconductor) There has been an increase in research activi...

Researchers at West Virginia University found that exposure to white light at night could impact recovery of cardiac patients and dimming the light can reduce the damages. With the results published in Experimental Neurology, the research team, led by Randy Nelson, who chairs the Department of Neuroscience in the WVU School of Medicine, linked white light at night to inflammation, brain-cell death and higher mortality risk in cardiac patients. (Image: Pixaby) The researchers re-created cardiac arrest in animal models and divided the models into three groups that w...

BIOS Lighting, a specialist in the biological application of LED lighting, announced the installation of LED lighting system in the Gary and Mary West Emergency Department at UC San Diego Health in La Jolla, USA. The BIOS lights will aid patients and staff in UC San Diego Health’s geriatric emergency department (GED) in two crucial ways: to provide alertness during the daytime hours by adding a heightened amount of circadian signal; and by providing a unique wavelength of light dedicated to visual assessment of patients. (Image: BIOS L...

Soraa, founded by Shuji Nakamura, the Nobel Prize winner, announced a new series of blue light free LED lamp with its patented technology for enhancing health and well-being. (Image: Soraa) The new product, Soraa HEALTHY, with the featured ZEROBLUE technology, emits a blue-free spectrum which reduces melanopic lumens about 40 percent compared to conventional LEDs. According to Soraa, the HEALTHY combine an engineered mix of green and red phosphors to produce a spectrum with a wide gap in the blue range, removing blue completely while retaining a h...

With awareness of the impacts of lighting on people’s physical and psychological well-being, luminaire makers have increased their product portfolio based on human centric lighting to meet the increasing demands of the market. Circadian lighting solution expert Healthe and home technology manufacturer Dyson have launched new lighting products with changing spectra that mimic natural light. Healthe introduced SunTrac A19, a product that combines engineered spectrums that have been optimized for both daytime and nighttime use into a circadian lamp. The lamp combines Healthe&...