Never mind those 10,000 steps, are you getting enough LIGHT in your diet? A new wearable sensor from Lys Technologies keeps a record of your daily light intake and lets you know where you’re going wrong.
I visited BRE in Watford this week to take a look at the way that The Biophilic Office project is shaping up – and we’ll be talking a lot more about that in the coming months (the trial runs into 2020). What I didn’t expect was to be handed the means to embarrass myself at the paucity of my Light Diet. I’m sitting at my desk, with lighting from a pair of Philips PAR38 LEDs (I’ve talked about my gorgeous vintage Inside-Out spotlights before) and one of those seriously funky Sunlike tunable task lights from Seoul Seminconductors. The Lys sensor is scoring my set-up at a miserable 60% of what I need. Whoops!
The premise is a straightforward one, based on the principle that the most important aspects of our daily lighting intake is to get a healthy boost of daylight in the morning – blue-rich, of course, but with a serious nudge towards sensible behaviour in the evening, killing the blue-end, warming up the colour, dropping the light levels – and getting ready for bed at 10pm.
The ‘nudge’ content of the Lys system is an important one. Not only do you get to make your own assessment of how well – or otherwise – your light environment might be, the App will also send you the occasional notification if you’re falling short of, or overloading, your light dietThe hardware is simple enough; the ‘wearable’ (yes, another example of adjectives taking the place of nouns, just to annoy me) is a button sensor (there – getting my own back with a noun being used as an adjective. Just try and stay with me)
For the sensor to make sense of what its measuring, it needs to be as close to the eyes as possible, fitted to a shirt or jacket . . . or strapped to your brow if you fancy riffing a 1960s Sci-Fi vibe. Go on – you know you want to . . .
Things to avoid then: wearing sunglasses – that’s just silly . . . and going out in really cold weather wearing the kind of clothes that mean you need to keep the fleece jacket open at the top. But we’ll get used to this kind of thing, I’m sure.
There is a very neat graphical representation showing your progress through the day, illustrating the times when things were good – and when things were not good. From a ‘nudge’ point of view that means you can match up your light diet with your physical environment . . . and how dangerous might that become for the HR department?
The nice people at Lys are delivering my personal Light Diet Plan to me next week and I promise to keep you all informed as to my progress.
I’m sure that Lys Technologies will be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have about this important piece of kit. We’ve been talking about Circadian Rhythms and asking how we can realistically assess our lit environment, well – here’s one way of doing it.
