Abstract
Light exposure has a profound impact on human physiology and behaviour. For example, light exposure at the wrong time can disrupt our circadian rhythms and acutely suppress the production of melatonin. In turn, appropriately timed light exposure can support circadian photoentrainment. Beginning with the discovery that melatonin production is acutely suppressed by bright light more than 40 years ago, understanding which aspects of light drive the 'non-visual' responses to light remains a highly active research area, with an important translational dimension and implications for "human-centric" or physiologically inspired architectural lighting design. In 2018, the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) standardised the spectral sensitivities for predicting the non-visual effects of a given spectrum of light with respect to the activation of the five photoreceptor classes in the human retina: the L, M and S cones, the rods, and the melanopsin-containing intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). Here, we described a novel, lean, user-friendly, open-access and open-source platform for calculating quantities related to light. The platform, called luox, enables researchers and research users in chronobiology, sleep research and adjacent field to turn spectral measurements into reportable quantities. The luox code base, released under the GPL-3.0 License, is modular and therefore extendable to other spectrum-derived quantities. luox has been endorsed by the CIE following black-box validation.
Highlights
Light profoundly affects human physiology and behaviour[1]
Exposure to light in the evening and at night can suppress the production of melatonin[2,3,4,5,6] and delay phase of the circadian rhythm[3,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], while morning light exposure advances the circadian phase[10,11,12]
Exposure to light modulates alertness[14,15,16], and there is emerging evidence for a direct role of light in regulating mood[1,17,18]. These ‘non-visual effects’ of light are mediated by a subset of the retinal ganglion cells which express the photopigment melanopsin[19,20,21,22,23,24], a shortwavelength sensitive pigment with a peak spectral sensitivity near 480 nm[20,25,26]
Summary
This updated version includes a description of the CIE endorsement and validation. At the same time, principled approaches to realising physiologically inspired lighting based on scientific evidence are emerging (e.g. see 44). Both the development of recommendations and applying basic neuroscience findings in architectural lighting design require the ability to use a common currency to quantitatively describe the effect of light on people
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