Smarter lighting for life

Sunlight impacts many biological and psychological processes, including those governing people’s circadian rhythm and mental and physical health. But in modern societies people spend most of their time inside buildings. Designing building facades which provide optimal access to daylight without introducing glare and high heating and cooling loads is a key challenge. For interior spaces, future artificial daylight solutions that mimic the essential characteristics of real windows or skylights are being investigated. But also there, balancing high light levels for health benefits with low energy consumption is a challenge. These conflicting requirements may be met by the application of Ambient Intelligence methods. Context-aware systems allow automatic adaptation of environmental conditions to individual health, comfort or safety needs, while limiting energy use to relevant times and locations at the same time. This lecture outlines key opportunities and challenges in this exciting field.