Life in modern Western society is marked by a lack of exposure to natural light. About 90% of our time is spent indoors where we are exposed to artificial light that is believed by doctors to cause harm to our health by disrupting our biological clocks.
Rinat Hadashi Gannon, a master’s degree student in Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning has developed an approach designed to improve health outcomes in inpatient rooms by exposing them to daylight indoors.
Light significantly affects our physiological and psychological health, well-being, and performance and plays a substantial role in regulating the circadian rhythm, modulating the cycle of sleep and wakefulness, and neurological and hormonal processes that affect our health.
Myriad of benefits of daylight
Previous research has shown that the incorporation of daylight in inpatient wards contributes to improved sleep quality, lower consumption of medications, reduced length-of-stay, less depression and stress, and even a decrease in death rates.
The Technion researcher working under the supervision of Faculty dean Prof. Guedi Capeluto, developed new tools and techniques to evaluate daylight in inpatient rooms and to provide design guidelines for improved inpatient health. According to their findings, even architectural changes that are relatively simple to create can improve daylight availability inside hospital wards, including full-opening windows, overhangs, adjustable blinds, and light shelves.
The team emphasized that the evaluation of daylight availability in the hospitalization period must take into consideration seasonal changes in different orientations. Hadashi Gannon and Capeluto believe that their model could contribute to the evaluation of daylighting performance in the built environment and can also be applied in other contexts such as work environments and educational institutions.
They also think their model can guide and benefit design and positively impact the psychological and physical state of users, their alertness and concentration, and aspects such as performance, health, and well-being.
The location chosen for conducting the research is a side-lit, two-bed inpatient room that is common in Israeli hospitals. The semi-private patient room was chosen because patients in the beds far from the window are exposed to insufficient daylight due to the distance from the window, the screens between the beds, and control of the curtains and blinds by the patient whose bed is near the window.
To ensure that the computer simulations reflected real-life conditions, seasonal measurements of daylight were made in inpatient rooms at Soroka-University Medical Center in sunny Beersheba. These measurements were used to calibrate the computer model.
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