Evaluating the Impact of a Bespoke Daylight-simulating Luminaire on Mood, Agitation, Sleep-wake Cycles, Rest-activity Patterns and Social Wellbeing Parameters in a Care Home for People with Dementia (Preprint)

Abstract

Living with a diagnosis of dementia can involve managing certain behavioural and psychological symptoms. As such, the evolution of technology has enabled many smart home or digital health solutions to monitor different aspects of one’s health on a daily basis. This paper focuses on the use of a dynamic lighting and sensing technology used to support the circadian rhythm, behavioural and psychological symptoms and wellbeing of people living with dementia.

The aim is to understand how dynamic lighting as opposed to static lighting may impact the wellbeing of those who are living with dementia.

An ethically approved trial is conducted within a care home for people with dementia. Data is collected in both quantitative and qualitative formats using environmentally-deployed radar sensing technology and the validated QUALIDEM wellbeing scale respectively. Metrics are collected for 11 participants on mood, social interactions, agitation, sense of feeling, sleep and rest-activity over a period of 16 weeks.

Results highlight that dynamic lighting shows statistically significant improvement with a moderate effect size in wellbeing parameters including positive affect (p = 0.030), social isolation (p = 0.048) and feeling at home (p = 0.047) after 5-10 weeks of dynamic lighting. Results also highlight statistically significant improvements in rest-activity related parameters of inter-daily stability (p < 0.001), intra-daily variation (p<0.001) and relative amplitude (p=0.033) from baseline to weeks 5-10, with the effect propagating for inter-daily stability at weeks 10-16 as well (p < 0.001). Non-significant improvements are also noted for sleep metrics with a small effect size, however the affect in agitation does not reflect this improvement.

Dynamic lighting has the potential to support wellbeing in dementia, with seemingly stronger influence in earlier weeks where the dynamic lighting initially follows the static lighting contrast, before proceeding to aggregate as marginal gains over time.

Pilot study registered under IRAS ID 311547