Hacker News Reader

Comment by mooism2 | Hacker News Reader

Even assuming this works reliably, £160 seems overpriced for what's basically a couple of small torches.

This sort of thing just screams bullshit. Yes, I get that light therapy or whatever it's called is prescribed but somehow I doubt that two little LEDs shoved in your ears is anything close to a substitute.

At least there's a lot of pretty graphs on their website: http://www.valkee.com/uk/science.html#evidence

These are aimed for people suffering the winter depression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

That's what I was thinking of. But, like I said, I doubt little ear lights are a substitute for giant light panels.

Then again, maybe they are. It's just too suspicious.

It feels overpriced, but they're competing with daylight lamps, and those are in the 100 - 300 euro range, with most being around 200 euro (I'm currently looking for one, suggestions welcome!). So in that context, they're priced at market-rate.

Yeah, but daylight lamps have the extraordinarily ability to light up an entire room.

I think that's just a function of power. I have a daylight box that runs at 400W; it lights the room fine, and so does the 600W halogen. Funnily enough a 60W regular bulb doesn't really compare.

Off-the-shelf incandescents should do the job: the resulting spectrum matches daylight best compared to other sources (you get close to full spectrum black body radiation, like from the sun). It just becomes a question of supplying enough, but a 100W lamp (or two) near your work area may be enough to boost your mood. I'm no expert on SAD, but from the lighting physics side, "daylight" lamps sound like a scam.

I don't think you're right about incandescents - light from them is much yellower than from a full-spectrum bulb. Question: wouldn't an incandescent have to be at the same temp as the sun to produce the same colour black-body output? (Happy to be corrected here if I'm missing something.)

At home we have a 600W halogen that is much yellower than our 400W daylight box. Subjectively the daylight bulb feels much more natural. That's not to say there are or aren't any benefits for SAD/depression of course.

'natural' until you look out the window to see it's dark, of course. For that reason I tend to prefer the halogen if I want light in the evening - the yellow tone provides plenty of light without trying to pretend that it's daytime.

A 100W incandescent has a color temperature of about 3000 K, while the sun is 5700 K, so yes, it does appear more yellow. Because both incandescents and the sun are essentially black bodies, their color temperature is their actual temperature (the filament in an incandescent is about 3000 K).

Other light sources, such as white LEDs can produce 5700 K light, but their spectrum is actually much different from solar. They can get away with emulating 5700 K with only two or three wavelengths, while a black body emits approximately continuously throughout the wavelengths (this is due to the way correlated colour temperature is calculated; incandescents and the sun waste a lot of energy on non-visible infrared wavelenghts).

For electricity efficiency purposes, LEDs are great, because they don't waste electricity generating wavelengths we don't see (or ones that are cancelled out by other wavelengths). But for SAD, white light is likely not the requirement; our eyes have cells that have different sensory response based on wavelength -- apparent colour is an afterthought. Some of these cells are thought to affect SAD through melatonin inhibition, so the big question would be: what wavelengths are these cells most sensitive too, so we can optimize lights for them? Some cursory googling says that the jury is still out on that one.

tl;dr: colour temperature of light isn't what we should be optimizing for when dealing with SAD, because our eyes have spectrum sensors, not colour sensors. Be wary of marketing hype because you can likely get away with $1 lightbulbs, instead of $300 lamps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com