Develop Phototherapy of Improving the Quality of Sleep and Healthcare for Patients With Sleep Disorder, Mild Cognitive Impairment, or Dementia: a Novel Light Emitting Diode (LED) Application on Health Promotion

Solar light is an important environmental factor for all living organisms. With the advancement of the lighting technology, artificial light, such as light emitting diode (LED), has become another major lighting source. The influence of blue light and color temperature emitted from LED light source in most of the commercial 3C electronics on human health has been increasingly paid attention. Light exposure has been reported to be associated with different physiological mechanisms and pathologic events, including sleeping, metabolism and brain dysfunctions. However, lights are also applied in many therapeutic processes. Hence, it is a critical issue to develop a next-generation lighting environment for health promotion and improve the competitiveness of green-technology industries in Taiwan by integrating biomedical researches and cutting-edge lighting technology. For developing next-generation LED industry, the inspection technology and product standard on photobiology safety has been established in Taiwan. Inspiringly, Researchers in Taiwan have made a LED structure that can emit all the hues of sunlight by changing its terminal voltage, which may further facilitate the use of future lighting device on health promotion. Based on these technical advancement, in this project, investigators aim to integrate multidisciplinary investigations on animal experiments, translational applications, and clinical trials to establish an good lighting environment for participants with dementia and mild cognitive dysfunction, and bring benefits to Taiwan's green technologies. To meet this goal, this project aims to integrate lighting and information technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) and data science analytics, to investigate the lighting effects on human health by conducting animal and translational experiments, and further promote the health in multiple testing groups across different patients. In this project, investigators incorporate the research strengths in light bioscience, environmental bioscience and medical engineering developed at National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) and the lighting, IoT and data science technologies developed at National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL). Additionally, investigators aim to collaborate with the division of neurology, ophthalmology and dermatology at the Kaohsiung Medical University, and make a new phototherapy for participants suffering from dementia, sleep disorder, cognitive dysfunction by using IoT and data science on big health and environmental data. By integrating multi-disciplinary technologies, investigators aim to promote health on brain, mind and body for elderly people and susceptible population by providing a health home lighting environment, which would be potentially beneficial to resolve the emerging issues of aging, sub-health population, psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. Moreover, the safety and molecular mechanism of phototherapy will be validated using animal models. Industrially, this project will build a strong linkage between LED, information and health promotion industries and upgrade the traditional LED industry by adding the novel application on health promotion.