High-Tech Lights to Help Baby Sleep, or Students Stay Alert
Like many expecting parents, Tracy Mizraki Kraft in Portola Valley, Calif., worried about how her newborn would sleep. So she paid attention when her doctor handed her a light bulb that he said would help her son do just that.
The small amber bulb, called Sleepy Baby, seemed to work well, she said, creating a soothing environment for Leo, now 16 months, as he drifted off to sleep.
For Ms. Mizraki Kraft, the bulb’s appeal was self-preservation. But it is part of a technological revolution coming to homes, offices, hotels and schools through lighting designed to undo the ill effects of artificial light — both overhead and on screen — and help regulate sleep, alertness and even people’s moods.
“Lighting is really not about a fixture in the ceiling anymore,” said Mariana Figueiro, who leads light and health research at the Lighting Research Center of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “It’s about delivering individualized light treatments to people.”
Scientists have understood for years that different levels and colors of light can have powerful biological effects on humans. But that concept has been applied only with expensive bulbs — costing as much as $300,000 — for specialty applications like mimicking the 24-hour cycle for astronauts or treating jaundice in newborns.
Now, with lighting technology, especially LEDs, becoming more sophisticated and less expensive, companies are developing so-called biological lighting for ordinary consumers.
The Lighting Science Group makes Sleepy Baby and is among the companies that are most devoted to the growing market for lighting to enhance rest or alertness, with bulbs like Good Night, and Awake and Alert.
But other companies, from start-ups to the biggest lighting manufacturers, have products promising similar results. General Electric announced this year that it would release a color-changing LED as part of its Align product line that is compatible with Apple’s HomeKit system and is meant to automate lighting according to the natural sleep cycle.
Two years ago, Philips introduced the Hue, a Wi-Fi-connected bulb compatible with Apple systems that offers “light recipes” conducive to waking up and winding down.
Digital Lumens, which makes and manages smart lighting systems for commercial and industrial settings, including supermarkets, is supplying lights for a study at Brown University aimed at controlling brightness and spectrum to promote learning among adolescents. And a company calledLumiFi has an app to adjust lighting in homes and commercial spaces like hotels, with settings like Rest, Energize, Focus and Sexy.
“With these kinds of bulbs that are coming to the market, you can suddenly now put better lighting controls systems, very affordable, into the hands of everyone,” said Beatrice Witzgall, an architect and lighting designer who founded LumiFi. “It’s a big revolution.”
Companies are also focusing on a host of health applications for lighting, said Milos Todorovic, who leads bioelectronics research at Lux Research. Among these are changing a person’s mood and affecting actual physical processes inside the body, he said, including using light to enhance collagen regeneration to help heal wounds.
It’s all part of a goal — to undo, in effect, the damage that regular lighting has done to the body’s natural rhythms.
The new consumer-oriented bulbs, for example, are designed to regulate the body’s basic need to rest and wake up by stimulating receptors in the eyes that signal to the brain when it is time for bed and when it is time to go about the activities of the day.
When exposed to short-wavelength light, the blue end of the spectrum, those receptors suppress the release of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin.
Since white artificial light, especially the LEDs used in bulbs and illuminated screens, is typically high in blue, exposure after dusk tends to reduce sleepiness and increase alertness, leading to an epidemic in sleep deficiency, said Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“Just in the last 50 years we have had a tenfold increase in the amount of artificial light being used per capita, so everything is much brighter between when the sun sets and when we go to bed at night,” he said.
That has had the effect of pushing back the body’s internal clock by three to five hours, he added, meaning that people are going to bed later but are “still trying to get up with the chickens.”
Using bulbs after sunset that emit longer-wavelength light, which looks more yellow, can help arrest that cycle not because they induce sleep, he said, but because they interfere less with the hormones and neurons that encourage the body to fall asleep.
Researchers are still determining how spectrum and intensity of light affect the brain, and are looking at ways not only to promote sleep but also to enhance alertness, productivity and learning.
Dr. Figueiro at Rensselaer Polytechnic said intense red light appears to stimulate energy and activity without suppressing melatonin. A student of hers, she said, concluded in a research project that it might be possible to affect energy levels through changing the intensity of lights rather than their color.
At Brown University, researchers are looking at both spectrum and intensity to design a system to help adolescents stay alert in school.
“If we just did blue enhanced light it might be better for the circadian timing system, but it might not be as good for the alertness and the academic needs that they have,” said Mary A. Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior who studies sleep in children, adolescents and young adults. “We want to see if we can hit on the best combination that will enhance those features.”
It is only now, she said, with the advances in LEDs, engineering and Wi-Fi that the potential exists to take that kind of system, once developed, out of the lab and distribute it broadly at a reasonable price.
What consumers will find reasonable will depend on their priorities, as the bulbs come at a premium. A starter pack of the Hue, which includes three bulbs and a hub that connects to a Wi-Fi router, costs close to $200, with single bulbs costing about $60. Align AM and PM bulbs cost close to $25 and $20, respectively.
The Lighting Science Group is fine-tuning its biological lighting line and expects to bring down prices. For now, though, the Good Night costs about $60, while the Awake and Alert runs around $70.
But with Sleepy Baby, which costs about $30, the company may have hit upon the ideal customers: parents desperate for, well, a sleepy baby.
“When you’re a new mom, you’re ready and willing to try anything that’s going to help you and your child sleep,” Ms. Mizraki Kraft said. “Mainly for my own preservation, I knew that I really wanted him to sleep through the night really early.”
Other parents who have tried the bulb express a similar sentiment.
“It’s a lifesaver, especially when you’re a working mom,” said Susan L. Sheehan, a pediatric and prenatal dietitian in Rhode Island. She put the bulb, a gift from a neighbor, in the nursery when her daughter, Kate, was about 5 months old, and found she no longer woke up as much during late-night diaper changes. “She might just slightly stir and then just go right back to sleep.”
And Chip Brian, a co-owner of Best & Company, a contracting firm in Queens, said that when he put the bulb in his sons’ room, his 4-year-old, an “active night kid,” suddenly slept through until morning. The change was so extreme that his wife thought the boy might be sick and went to check on him, Mr. Brian said. “I was sort of amazed.”
