Hyunjoo Bae, a master candidate of CED Lab made an oral presentation entitled as, “Sitting posture based lighting system to enhance the desired mood” on the AIC 2015 Midterm Meeting held in Tokyo. In this presentation, she introduced the concept of posture-based lighting system that manipulates the quality of lighting and is operated by user’s posture change. Professor Luo, the chair of the session, commented that the study was very interesting as a new type of smart lighting and what would be better to consider in further study (Hyunjoo and Prof.Luo in the picture). Based on this conference paper, Hyunjoo wrote a paper recently published in Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea(see the article).

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to analyze sitting posture as a cue of desired lighting mood of users in office environment. The experiment was conducted to observe people’s postures during they were performing different tasks. From the empirical study, four sitting postures were clustered based on sets of data, such as the head, lumbar, hip, thigh pressure and the distance between the backrest and the body. The results indicated that sitting postures could be classified by sensor values. Also there was significant effect of task types on sitting posture types. People were subconsciously leaning forward when concentrating, whereas they were leaning back when relaxing. In addition, differently from what we anticipated, there was no significant difference between subconscious and conscious sitting postures in each task. Consequently we developed a posture based lighting system that manipulates the quality of office lighting and is operated by changes in one’s posture. Facilitated by this system, color temperature ranges between 3000 K and 7000 K and correlated the illumination ranges between 300 lx and 700 lx. This study demonstrates how human emotion can interact with lighting mediated through physical behavior.