Improving the Mood of Elderly with Coloured Lighting

The ACE project aims at developing an adaptive ambience creation platform which can improve the well-being of elderly people in care centers. The system will contain a sensing platform, which measures and analyses the context in a room and an ambience creation platform, which creates ambiences with proven effectiveness for improving the mood of the elderly. It has been shown in literature that lighting can influence people’s mood; however, consistent effects have scarcely been documented. The effects of lighting characteristics on atmosphere perception, on the other hand, are better documented. It has been proved that ambiences with a positive affective meaning (e.g. cosy, activating) can be created with the combination of functional and atmospheric LED lighting. We expect that these ambiences can improve the mood of elderly towards its affective meaning. The experiments we intend to perform in order to achieve that goal are discussed in the paper.