lighting

Feeling a bit lost? Having no idea exactly where you are on a map isn’t a big deal most of the time. But knowing the way – home, to the bus stop, or to the nearest bathroom – can be very scary indeed – Waylosing and wayfinding in the outdoors: a typology of wayfinding approaches to […]

Dreading the alarm? – could a dawn simulator help? Millions will be struggling to get up and off to work after the break today. It’s even harder for those juggling their own desire to hit the snooze button with getting the kids off to school. Could a ‘dawn simulator’ help? A dawn simulator is a

24/7 I hope you, like me, have been taking a break and making the most of the chance to get outside. to see friends and family and catch up on sleep. For millions of dedicated healthcare workers – and the patients and families they serve, the holiday season is the busiest time of the year:

In their shoes (or bed 😉 I spend a lot of time looking at lighting from a patient’s or resident’s perspective – that includes what they see while lying down in bed, as many do for hours on end. There is some excellent research on visual discomfort and ceilings in offices – here are a

Hiding in plain sight As a lighting person, it’s tempting to reach for a technical fix to the persistent problem of insufficient light levels during the day in residential healthcare settings. But what if the solution was as simple as opening the nets and turning the chair? Light levels and spectrum readings, gathered during a

Light at the end of the tunnel Just two weeks left before the shortest day of the year. But it’s pretty dark in the meantime. If you can get outside for just 30 minutes at lunchtime, you’ll improve your ability to sleep and to smile – Genome-wide gene by environment study of time spent in daylight

Shining a light on World Aids Day World AIDS Day 2025 While HIV/AIDS isn’t often in the headlines these days, it’s still a global public health concern, claiming over 44 million lives to date, with 40.8 million people living with the condition today. The UN has a stated goal of eliminating the disease by 2030, with the

Talking turkey Although it may feel an odd topic to broach over the Thanksgiving dinner table, the Surgeon General declared Thanksgiving, 27th of November, as the day for families to share their health history –Announcement: National Family History Day — November 24, 2016.  That’s because your genetic inheritance significantly affects your risk of developing a range

Seeing the wood for the trees Your brain processes elements of a scene in parallel, then adds them up or integrates them to make meaning – known as ‘Feature Integration’ – A feature-integration theory of attention. We were born with some ‘priors’ or assumptions about how things usually work in the world – light from above

Messy science It’s notoriously tough to run lighting experiments in the ‘real world’. In residential healthcare, it’s even harder. After all, your subjects may not be around for more than a few months, measuring personal light exposure is difficult – Wearable monitoring for evaluating non-visual effects of light on health and well-being: a systematic review. Building and