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Imagine if dull fluorescent lights could pump sunshine into your office instead. As this ScienCentral News video reports, researchers are doing that with fiber optics, promising office workers increased well-being and improved productivity.
Lighten Up
When the summer light fades and fall surrenders to winter, lethargy shuffles up a tidy path to knock at Noel Yap's door where it enters, decamps and settles into his skin. Yap dreads the visit, knowing that loss of sunlight and its accompanying sluggishness affect his performance at a busy New York finance firm where he's paid to sniff out bugs in the company software.
In winter, "my body may be awake but my mind isn't," explains the financial software developer. "I'll get on the subway, go through the motions and finally wind up at work, where I don't really start being productive until later during the day."
A few years ago, Yap learned that he suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, a condition characterized by depression, lethargy, chronic fatigue and weight gain, among others symptoms, triggered by loss of sunlight. In 2001, an estimated 25 percent of Americans suffered from SAD, National Mental Health Association figures show.
Yap's yearly slide into slow was once spurred on in high-walled cookie cutter cubicles awash in fluorescent light that he said made his listlessness worse. "I didn't see much sunlight during the day and it wasn't too pleasant," he says. Yap's since moved to an office that's ringed with windows but still relies on a full spectrum lamp to light his way through winter doldrums.
The last place Yap would look for new tools to add to the arsenal he has to combat his condition would probably be on the roof of a three-story building at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in rural Tennessee. But that's precisely where technology featured in Discover Magazine and designed by electro-optical engineer Jeff Muhs is set to bring a little sunshine into the lives of people whose access to full spectrum lighting impacts productivity. Face to the sun, a 46-inch-wide silver dish rotates and bounces light to a smaller unit. The concentrated sunlight is funneled into cables filled with silicone gel fibers that Muhs first discovered in Japan. The cables slink beneath the roof, snake behind insulation and cut a path to hybrid fixtures that house an acrylic sunlight-diffusing rod and traditional fluorescent bulbs. On sunny days the result is a lab aglow with full spectrum light. It beats greenish fluorescent shine and promises benefits galore.
image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
"We can read better," Muhs says. "We can see better. And it puts us in a better mood." Studies have also tied natural light to improved productivity and rises in test scores. Yap knows all about how light impacted his academics. "Looking back at it, my grades during the fall semester were much worse than my grades during the spring semester," he says. He'd love for his office to have more natural light to improve his mood in winter and to help him with job performance, he says, adding, "I'd definitely be more productive. I'd be awake pretty much as soon as I walked inside the door." The hitch is that the technology only works on sunny days since it doesn't store energy and reconvert it. In winter climates the sun could only be piped in if the skies overhead cooperated. Still, Yap says even a few days of natural lighting in winter are better than none.
If CEOs in firms like Yap's wanted to pipe in sunlight, they'd need one $4000 dish to light 500 square feet of space. But the investment would pay for itself in the form of much lower energy bills, Muhs says. Alternative energy groups predict that the technology could save companies nearly $1 billion over the next ten years and ease woes like the California energy crisis and the East Coast power grid blackout of last summer.
"This technology would reduce the use of electricity during those peak times when blackouts and brownouts occur on hot, sunny days when we use our air conditioners a lot and we have lights on in buildings throughout the day," Muhs explains.
Over the next decade, ORNL researchers will work to refine the technology and are already set to introduce it to the private sector. Until it gains widespread popularity, workers like Yap will have to wait awhile until the sun shines in to the office.
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