Luminous Relationships: Light for Health & Wellbeing
How does lighting effect health and well-‐being: winter blues, waking up, alertness and learning, energy dips, sleep habits? A lighting revolution is underway! It has been fueled by understanding how the dual character of light interacts with vision and emotion in the context of sustainable energy, responsive and expressive environments, remote connectivity, and enlightened communication. Although light is ubiquitous and often taken for granted, there are several psychological effects of light that benefit many application contexts. In this presentation I will give an overview of several psychological effects of light documented in literature and introduce some application scenarios Philips is working on. Next, I will discuss in more detail some of the controlled laboratory studies we have conducted into the psychological effects of light.
Boris de Ruyter, Senior Research Scientist, Philips Research
Boris De Ruyter graduated as an experimental psychologist from the University of Ghent in Belgium and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Technology in Eindhoven. Since 1994 he has been with Philips Research where he is Principal Scientist. Besides his research on user-‐system interaction, De Ruyter has played a central role in developing the Ambient Intelligence vision and related research facilities such as HomeLab. He is the author of multiple international publications and owns numerous patents. He was the co-‐chair of the European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence and is active in several program committees of scientific events such as the SIGCHI, AVI and MobileHCI conferences. His research on how lighting effects human behavior and emotion is widely cited and has been inspiration for several new products at Philips.