Healthcare affective lighting (HAL) : systems and methods for the study of ‘non-visual’ effects of indirect, ‘blue-regulated’, full spectrum, solid state, ‘white’ lighting on clinician wellness and performance, and ‘patient-safety’

Abstract

The hypothesis of this study is that clinician wellness and performance in the execution of clinical procedures at the emergency department (ED) can be improved through controlled, indirect, ‘blue’-regulated, full visible spectrum, tunable, solid state, ‘white’ lighting, compared to prevalent fluorescent lighting conditions.

Future work is to expand the scope of our study to advance ‘patient-safety’ in related clinical situations, such as: clinician cognitive recovery from medical error, hand-offs, and improvement of teamwork conditions. These are known clinical scenarios where prevalence of adverse events has been observed, that might be prevented and precluded through environmental interventions such as controlled lighting. Dynamic lighting, temporal effects, ethics, human variability factors, and the interoperability between lighting systems and human objective psycho-physiological variables will be considered.

Short wavelength (‘blue’) light is known to mediate ‘non-visual’ effects of light in humans. These effects, that go beyond the pure ‘visual’ function, can affect human wellness and performance, as it has been reported in previous scientific research in laboratory, office, education, clinical and aero-space setups. Lighting has been recognized in the fields of human factors, ergonomics, and systems engineering, as an environmental factor that can affect clinician wellness and performance, and the occurrence of medical error. The aim and novelty of this research is to study the potentially beneficial ‘non-visual’ effects of lighting in the clinical environment to advance ‘patient-safety’.

This study suggests that it is possible that indirect, ‘blue-enriched’, full visible spectrum, tunable, solid state, ‘white’ lighting, might reduce clinician sleepiness and workload perceptions, might reduce clinical procedures execution time, and might reduce the occurrence of medical error (compared to prevalent fluorescent lighting conditions).

To conduct our inquiry, we perform a randomized AB/BA crossover experimental lighting study with actual ED clinicians that execute clinical procedures, in a realistic ED clinical setting, under two lighting conditions. We use the existing fluorescent lighting as control condition. To provide the appropriate experimental lighting condition, we develop a novel multichannel solid state lighting system for precise control and assessment of the light spectrum, with specific emphasis in the short wavelength spectral area.