Lighting to Make You Feel Better: Improving the Mood of Elderly People with Affective Ambiences

Current lighting technologies extend the options for changing the appearance of rooms and closed spaces, as such creating ambiences with an affective meaning. Using intelligence, these ambiences may instantly be adapted to the needs of the room’s occupant(s), possibly improving their well-being. We hypothesized that ambiences with a clearly recognizable, positive affective meaning could be used to effectively mitigate negative mood in elderly. After inducing a sad mood with a short movie one group of elderly was immersed in a positive high arousing (i.e., activating) ambience, and another group in a neutral ambience. Similarly, after inducing anxiety with a short movie one group of elderly was immersed in a pleasant low arousing (i.e., cozy) ambience, and another group in a neutral ambience. We monitored the evolution of the mood of the four groups of elderly over a period of ten minutes after the mood induction, with both self-reported mood measurements (every 2 minutes) and constant measurements of the skin conductance response (SCR) and electrocardiography (ECG). In line with our hypothesis we found that the activating ambience was physiologically more arousing than the neutral ambience. The cozy ambience was more effective in calming anxious elderly than the neutral ambience, as reflected by both the self-reported and physiological measurements.