Morgan Pattison, principal of SSLS, Inc., senior technical advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solid-State Lighting Program, and lead author of DOE’s Solid State Lighting R&D Plan, recently contributed an article to LD+A Magazine stating the majority of lighting/health research has been in laboratory conditions. For real progress to be made in developing best practices, more field research is needed.
Right now, there’s still a lot we don’t know about physiological responses to light. Most research to date has been conducted in laboratories, where the conditions don’t always match what happens in the real world, so there’s a need for more studies in real-world settings where the light stimulus is realistic and the physiological responses can be collected from a sufficiently large group of participants.
He said DOE is working toward this goal through roundtables that bring disparate experts together, funding studies, and through the SSL Program’s GATEWAY program.
It’s clear that there is a lot of work to be done on the topic of physiological responses to light… SSL technology, coupled with the new understanding in physiological responses to light, offers the potential for lighting to be both optimized for health and highly efficient. But that’s only possible if we have a clear understanding of the physiological responses to light in real-world conditions.
Click here to read it.
