The lighting in your home is probably different from that in your work space. We use different lights for different tasks, but it’s not always easy to know if you have the right light for your space. Now thanks to the recently launched WaveGo™ spectrometer, we can easily analyse and assess the quality of light.
In days before electricity and gas, we relied natural light to carry out our daily tasks. But in today’s world we fill our spaces artificial light. Whether that’s spotlights in our office, a decorative floor lamp in our home, or even the backlit LED screen of your smartphone or laptop.
Studies have shown that exposure to poor artificial light can have health implications, such as eye damage and disruptions to your circadian rhythms, or your body's biological clock. It can also have an impact on your recovery in hospital, or your ability to study at exam time.
Finding the right light level in your home or place of work might not be top of your list, but it’s essential for your health, wellbeing and productivity. On average we spend around 90% of our time indoors. During that time we’re exposed to a lot of artificial light, and that’s why we should make sure that the light we’re exposed to is of a good quality.
WaveGo spectrometer
Thanks to the WaveGo™ spectrometer from Wave Illumination, we can begin to understand the light in our environments and ensure that we have the right light for the job.
Paired with your smartphone, the WaveGo™ is a handheld light measurement system that can capture essential metrics to help you assess light quality. Recipient of a prestigious Red Dot Product Design Award 2019, the technology can interpret the data on your smartphone and connect to the WaveCloud™ data storage platform to instantly share the data online.
Brought to the market by the Wave Illumination startup team spun out of Ocean Insight, the device can interpret the data on your smartphone and connect to the WaveCloud™ data storage platform to instantly share the data online.
The device captures not only the lux measurement (unit of illumination), and intensity of light, but also its colour temperature, colour rendering, and perceived colour information. By understanding these measurements, you can begin to interpret the quality of the light you’re exposed to, which in turn ensures you have the right light for the job.
WaveGo™
Measuring light levels
The WaveGo™ can be used to tackle many light problems, beyond that of your office lighting. For example, the team have been working with conservationists at the Natural History Museum to assess the impact of light on ageing taxidermy collections.
The collection has been damaged by overexposure to light over the years, but with careful monitoring using WaveGo™, the conservation team to can ensure the collection is kept in a safer environment for years to come.
Paul Higham, business manager at Wave Illumination, said:
“The impact of light is far more complex than simply colour and intensity. Understanding light beyond a simple lux measurement will help harness its power to unlock hidden value. WaveGo™ will enable our customers across a huge range of industries from retail to horticulture to unlock the value of light.”
Measuring your light
Providing light is applied in the right way, the power of it is unfathomable helping us to improve our safety or even grow plants during our darkest months. But the next time you struggle to concentrate on a task, feel the onset of a headache or find yourself lying awake at night, will you consider the quality of light in your environment?
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