Light Sensitivity

═══ TEAM MEMBERS ═══
Led by Tyler Johnson and team members Sumbal Ghafoor and Brian Liu.

═══ PROBLEM ═══
Poor lighting of a room can cause migraines, seizures, tiredness, and distraction for some people.

═══ OBJECTIVE ═══
Create a way to measure a room’s light quality in order to predict which ones would be problematic for students sensitive to lighting and ensuring they are placed in the best-fit classroom.

An important accessibility issue, albeit less talked about, was taken on by Team Light Sensitivity, led by Tyler Johnson and team members Sumbal Ghafoor and Brian Liu.

The objective of this team was to  find a method of objectively measuring key factors of light sensitivity among many rooms of various layouts and predict which rooms may cause light sensitivity for students.

“Team Light Sensitivity is a project dear to my heart — or to my eye-brain. I’m really hoping we can push the science of understanding why — and more importantly, which — room lighting can cause migraines, seizures, tiredness, and distraction. If we can grade classroom and office lighting, we can push campus to ensuring only ‘good’ lighting makes it way through purchasing and help students who need to switch classrooms.”
– Prof. Karen Nakamura

The team created an experiment for measuring light, comparing the data between average “tolerable” rooms and “problematic” rooms. A light sensor would be used to measure a few key features such as luminance, flicker rate, blue light frequency and red light frequency. The outlier data would help identify the “problematic” rooms vs those in the middle which they would term “tolerable” classrooms. The team had been in the process of identification of such rooms.

The team also designed surveys for students to complete in class in these classrooms and compare them to surveys in control “tolerable” rooms.

The shutdown has really impacted the team as this is an entirely physical project that demands on-campus time by both the lab members and students they intend to survey. As a result the team had been unable to continue their work. They hope to resume when the campus reopens in fall.